The Sound of Silence
by Persephone Price
Summary: AU. Sequel to 'Turn the Page.' Sometimes, Dean feels like a rock jutting out in the middle of a turbulent ocean. Everything and everyone around him changes, but he remains stuck there, letting the violent waves crash over him. Little by little, he erodes... Claire, on the other hand, is swept up in the sea. Dean/OC, Dean-centric (OC isn't the protagonist).
1. Welcome to the Jungle

**A/N: Hello again! Here's the sequel to Turn the Page. I just want to thank everyone who reviewed/favorited/followed the last story one more time - I hope you all enjoy this one! The title is a Simon and Garfunkel song, which is amazing and very appropriate - if you don't know it, I suggest you listen to it for your own enjoyment.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own anything you recognize**

**Background: This is set a year after the first story, so approximately at the end of S6/beginning of S7. There will be some elements that are the same as the series, but a great deal that are different.**

**Song: Welcome to the Jungle by Guns n' Roses**

* * *

**PREFACE**

It has been one year since Dean and Claire left Las Vegas and started on the road together. Over this span of time they've taken some traditional hunting jobs, and Claire has grown to be a fairly decent hunter in her own right. However, their main concern has been putting a stop to Castiel's plan to absorb all the souls in Purgatory. He has been harnessing their power gradually to ensure that his vessel is not overwhelmed, but just recently Crowley has flung himself into the mix, forcing Cas to go all-in.

Meanwhile, Sam has been off soul-searching somewhere in Texas. He's met a girl – a veterinarian – named Amelia Richardson and has every intention of settling down with her. The only hitch in his design is that he's wracked by nightmares and hallucinations and, essentially, suffering from PTSD. He's afraid that maybe Dean was right, maybe there is no escape from this life and maybe it truly is part of the very fabric of his DNA. Even more, he's afraid that he's a danger to Amelia.

. . .

**PART I**

. . .

**CHAPTER 1**

**Welcome to the Jungle**

Dean's cell-phone is glued to his ear as he and his passenger race down a long Kansas highway. The red needle on the speedometer is pushing 100, and the engine roars and groans as it approaches its limit. The Impala is a faithful car, but it is still nearly a half-century old. And though he has rebuilt it from the ground-up many times before, it's still his same old Baby – his dad's same old Baby – that has brought him – _them_ – through so much. This car has outlasted John and predates Dean himself, but along the way it's picked up as many visible and invisible scars as any of the Winchesters. Sometimes, after all the running, even she gets a bit tired.

"Dammit, Sam! Answer the fuckin' phone!" Dean curses, white-knuckling the steering wheel. He flings the offending piece of plastic into the backseat in a frenzy of outrage, after being routed to his brother's voicemail for the sixth time in twenty minutes.

Claire squirms anxiously beside him. Her bare legs, still milky despite near-constant exposure to the sun, stick to the Chevy's leather seats.

"What if he doesn't come?"

"Then it's just you n' me, babe."

She gives his profile a hard, disapproving look, but he is fixated on the road. "We are so screwed," she laments.

Something akin to a bark of laughter claws up his throat. "Yep."

"What if we can't get through to him?"

All of a sudden Dean's expression turns deadly, devoid of all prior traces of dark mirth. "Then we have to stop him," he states, tone like steel.

She doesn't need to be told that 'stop' means _kill_. Gulping in obvious trepidation, she replies, "This would be a lot easier with backup."

"You're telling me," he snorts.

"What about Bobby?"

"He's working on making special Angel Blade bullets for the Colt, but he'll meet us there. Hopefully all those months of fixing it up weren't for nothin'."

"What do you think the chance of the Angel Blade itself not working are?" she asks cautiously.

He sets his jaw in grim contemplation, grinding his molars slightly. "Well, the sigils don't work anymore – not even blood sigils," he says finally. "I'd say the odds ain't exactly in our favor, at least when it comes to the Colt. But even the Angel Blade would have killed Lucifer, killed an archangel, so I'd say it's a pretty safe bet."

There's a long pause that stretches on for two road markers. The Guns N' Roses, Dean's self-described 'pump-up' music, filter raucously through the stereo.

At some point, Claire questions, "You don't think… You don't think he would actually hurt us, do you? I mean, it's Cas – he would never actually hurt us, right?"

"I dunno. There's a pretty big chance this thing ain't even Cas anymore." There is a poignant twinge of despair in his voice, and she knows that – of everyone who could betray them – Cas' betrayal slices a particularly deep gash in Dean's already fractured heart. Each time they have seen him, he's seemed less and less like Castiel and more and more like something they should be hunting. To watch someone you love disappear before your very eyes is an uncommon sort of torture.

Dean casts her a sidelong glance, and continues, "I'm bankin' on him leaving you alone, though. You're still a prophet, after all." This last sentence is a pointless addition, a fruitless attempt to disguise how wounded he is and how much danger they are truly in. Maybe it does matter that she is a prophet, and she certainly believes that it matters to him – but if Castiel would hurt Dean, it doesn't matter if he wouldn't hurt her.

They eventually pull off of the highway and, after a few minutes of sloppy navigation, veer onto a derelict road. Weeds sprout between the cracks in the sun-washed pavement, and in the distance they can see the spectral outline of the factory they seek. It cuts across the horizon like a jagged stripe of black paint atop the muted beauty of a watercolor landscape.

Dean parks the car. In front of them is a chain-link fence, broken in many places and strangled by winding vines. They know the building must be swarmed with various obstacles on the inside, but from this vantage point it's impossible to feel anything but utterly alone.

Claire has no idea what they're getting themselves into. Something in the atmosphere carries an ominous weight, more ominous than anything she has experienced before. It feels like they're about to enter a showdown.

They step out of the car in unison. Dean walks around back, stocking himself with every weapon he could possibly have use of, knowing they'll all likely be use_less_. Still he must take the precaution, still he must follow the ritual. It's mental preparation as much as it is physical. He then gives Claire as many weapons as she can comfortably carry, which, to his chagrin, is less than he can and far less than Sam ever could.

He still compares her to Sam sometimes, not because she reminds him of him but because he's the only one he's ever done this with before her. He knows he shouldn't, and the comparisons have become far more infrequent now that they've grown accustomed to one another. But still, every so often, thoughts of Sam, of the past, slip through. This present isn't necessarily worse, he supposes, just starkly different.

"When we go in there you stay behind me, you hear?" he briefs her.

Claire wants to roll her eyes, but doesn't because his stony expression warns against it. "Yeah, yeah."

In the beginning, she deferred to him completely. The first few hunts she asked so many questions he felt like a goddamn college professor – it was cute at first, but quickly devolved into a nuisance. But she learned fast, and time has made her cocky. Cockiness – after a year on the job – is exactly the thing that gets hunters killed. You see, most hunters don't die on their first case – no, the death rate spikes at about a year, when they think they know what they're doing and they let their guard down.

He worries about this incessantly. _Do as I say, not as I do_, he tells her, and she thinks he's joking but he isn't. She calls him paranoid and maybe he is, but he'd be crazy not to be. This is the source of the vast majority of their arguments.

"I'm serious."

"Okay," she concedes.

They're just about to start towards the vacant, overrun parking lot, when they sense someone standing behind them. Dean spins around, shotgun aimed, loaded, and ready to fire.

The person behind them raises his hands in apparent surrender – it's Crowley.

"Hello, my darling lovebirds."

"What the _hell_ are you doing here?" Dean demands, the words gushing out of his mouth in a fast, garbled stream of rage. "Gimme one good reason why I shouldn't blow your brains out right this second."

"Because that would be incredibly foolish," he drawls, inexplicably relaxed. "I'm here to help."

"Why should we trust a word you say?" Claire spits. The sentence drips with venom.

He cocks an eyebrow. "You shouldn't," he says plainly. "But we're after the same thing – to stop your lovably misguided Castiel from going nuclear. Believe it or not I don't want to be obliterated, and I'm fairly sure 'King of Hell' is near the top of his angelic little hit-list. So, I'm here to help. 'The enemy of my enemy,' and all that."

"We're here to stop him, not kill him," says Dean, well beyond wary.

"Tom-ay-to, tom-ah-to. You're telling me that if you can't stop him you're going to let him walk?"

The muscle in Dean's jaw contracts visibly, but he does not reply.

"That's what I thought," he says smugly. "Listen, I understand that you're not keen on the proposition, and frankly, neither am I. But do you really want that socially-inept Robocop flouncing around with unlimited power? You know as well as I that good ole Cas is seeming even more self-righteous than usual these days."

"I'd rather take my chances with Cas than ride the bullet with you."

"Oh pish-posh – what have I ever done to you _really_?"

"Are you kidding?" Claire interjects incredulously.

"If you're referring to our encounter in Las Vegas, that was _ages _ago, and an isolated incident. To be entirely honest, I could have done _far _worse. I've stayed out of your way for the most part since then, haven't I? Didn't you find it odd, Clyde, that your life has been flooded with demons since the age of four and then suddenly they all just disappear?"

The only present Winchester does not answer.

"You were planning on trying to make this deal all along?" she wonders aloud.

"Bingo," he replies, speaking to them as though they are idiots.

Claire has been staring at Dean curiously throughout this exchange, and in this moment he finally reciprocates her gaze.

"Would you like a moment to chat amongst yourselves?" asks Crowley, a smirk playing at his lips. He gesticulates outwards to them. "By all means."

Sending him one final lethal glare, Dean pulls Claire aside. Their backs are to Crowley, who takes one hand out of his black suit pocket and begins to casually inspect his fingernails.

"I know it's not ideal," she hisses, "but we need all the help we can get."

"You're not seriously considering what he said," he deadpans.

"You heard him – he has as much incentive to want to stop Cas as we do."

"To _kill_ Cas," he corrects.

"If Crowley stooping to team up with us is any indication of how worried he is, I think Cas can probably hold his own."

"But it's _Crowley_," he growls. "The guy who kidnapped you and held you hostage, remember?"

"I know – how could I forget. And I don't trust him for shit. But let's be realistic, we're two humans – it'd be useful to have something supernatural in our corner. And if Crowley tries anything fishy, we take him out. We are the least of his problems right now – Cas is the threat. You have to figure self-preservation is more important to him than screwing us over is."

Dean sucks the inside of his cheek, mulling this over. "Fine… But as soon as we stop Cas, we kill that son of a bitch and every other demon we can get our hands on."

"Okay," Claire agrees.

They whirl back around in an almost choreographed motion and Crowley peers up from his fingernails cheerily.

"So, have you two arrived to a decision?"

"Alright," Dean says through locked teeth. He raises his weapon once more, wagging it at him as he continues, "But if you or any of your mooks try anything – _anything_ – funny, we're switchin' sides and you're angel meat."

"Splendid," exclaims Crowley, clasping his hands together. He shifts his body slightly closer to the abandoned building. "Now, as King of Hell, I'm plenty prepared to go after these flying monkeys with my own forces – angel may trump demon, but I've got the numbers. The only thing is, your dear and shrewd Castiel has taken it upon himself to demon-proof the place, as you say, which is where you come in…"

"You want us to sneak inside and _un _-demon-proof it?" Dean observes.

"Precisely. And then my demon army and I scurry on in and save the day… Or, you know, something like that."

"And you can guarantee us immunity from them?" Claire questions, warranted suspicion lacing each letter.

"Of course," he replies. He sounds like he's lying and he knows it – he takes a sick pleasure in tormenting them with uncertainty.

Dean glances at Claire, before approaching a gaping, uneven hole in the fence. "We're gonna regret this…" he mutters to himself as he ducks through.

. . .

Dean and Claire have only desecrated one demon-warding sigil before a blonde, statuesque figure appears in their path, within yet another abandoned factory.

"Dean Winchester," she says disdainfully, "we may have expected _you_, but we did not expect _this_."

Dean is in no mood to make conversation; he lunges at her, Angel Blade in hand. She dodges him easily and throws him against the concrete wall with merely an extension of her palm.

"Does your depravity know no bounds?" she continues. "Was it not enough to shirk your sacred duty or to corrupt one of the Lord's most holy servants? Must you attempt to bring demons into Castiel's barracks now, too?"

"Listen, bitch," he snarls from the floor, "Whatever Cas told you he was doing, he was lying."

She laughs harshly, the sound burning through them like acid. "He is doing our father's work," she says, "after our father has abandoned us. The archangels are gone. Heaven is in ruins. We must follow someone, and that someone must be Castiel – he is God's clear successor."

"Great," Dean snaps, more to himself than anyone else, "More brainwashed sons of bitches."

He scrambles to his feet and jumps at her again, this time making contact. They tumble to the ground in a messy tangle of limbs, and Dean's Angel Blade somehow makes contact with her gut. She is consumed by a burst of white light, and it flickers as life tears from her vessel, grasping desperately and vainly for handholds on its way out. They both look away, but not out of respect; if they stare directly at it, it burns their retinas.

Once upon a time, killing angels – killing the so-called 'good guys' – might have bothered him. But not anymore. Things that aren't human aren't trustworthy, this he's learned the hard way.

Panting, sweating, and bruised, he tells Claire, "We gotta hurry with the sigils. Someone probably heard that, and before we know it we're gonna have a stampede of angels on our asses."

"Okay," she obeys, quickly spray-painting black X's over the occult graffiti decorating the dingy gray walls. The can makes an innocuous jingling sound when she shakes it, but even this noise could get them killed.

The factory is vast, but they don't need to canvas all of it – just enough to allow the most powerful demons through.

Three more dead angels later, Claire hisses, "How are we gonna know when it works?"

Dean does not need to answer her question; as if on cue, they are suffocated by a telltale sandstorm of black smoke.

"We gotta find Cas!" he yells over the sound of rushing air. Through the chaos, they cannot see each other.

He grabs her hand so they can stay together and they run down the hallway, run with the black wind at their back. It propels them so that they are half running and half soaring.

The demons sweep over them before they can follow their trail. For a brief moment Dean turns around, and instantly regrets it: scattered across the damp, moldy floor are the mangled bodies of at least a dozen angels, washed up by the tide of disembodied demons. He turns back around, and Crowley appears directly in front of them, blocking their way like a pop-up brick wall. He's not alone.

"Brought you a present," he says, stepping aside with a flourish to reveal Bobby. Without another word, he's gone.

Dean doesn't even need to look at him to know that Bobby is livid.

"What in the –"

"Later, Bobby," he interrupts gruffly, taking off once more.

Claire flies after him, and so does a reluctant Bobby. Unsystematic puddles are collected on the floor, recording their movements. The sound of their shoes sloshing through water echoes throughout the hall, which is now vacant but for the fallen angels. Their bodies impede the noise as it bounces from surface to surface.

. . .

Castiel is in the heart of the building – the boiler room. It is ironic that they find him here, in the deepest and darkest place available to him, the closest place to Hell he could have chosen.

He is glowing, almost beautiful. They have already failed. And he is alone.

The three of them hide in the doorway, watching in horror as he studies his radiating hand, as if for the first time.

"Dean," comes Castiel's voice. He doesn't look at them, but doesn't need to see them to know they are there.

Bobby fiddles with something in his pocket.

"Cas?" Muddled hesitation and fear and heartbreak make his voice more hoarse than usual. "Did you kill Crowley?"

"No," he answers flatly. "When he discovered he was too late, he fled before I had the chance." He pauses, finally turning to address them directly. By this time, they've filtered into the dank room and are standing in a line in front of him, opposite the entrance. "Did you come here to kill me?" There is no accusation in his tone, only inquiry.

"No," Dean replies unconvincingly.

Whatever Bobby was fiddling with in his pocket – the Colt, it turns out – tears from his hand and hits the opposite wall like a bird flying into a window. Bobby's eyes bulge out of his skull in dismay and Dean automatically bars Claire with one of his arms.

"Don't lie to me," Castiel growls, sounding only a smidgeon less mechanical.

"I'm not lying, Cas," says Dean, his voice wavering suddenly and unexpectedly. It is as though the sight of Colt has reminded him of the gravity of the situation, that this is his _friend_, not a monster, and that maybe he's now both. "Please… please don't do this."

Castiel tilts his head like a cat observing a canary. "It is already done, Dean."

"Then end it – put the souls back where they belong."

"They _belong_ in me, where I can do good with them."

"Don't you see, Cas? Don't you see what this is really doing to you? It's going to your head –"

"No," he cuts him off. "The only thing the souls are doing to my head is allowing me to think more clearly. I see everything, and now I understand what I must do. All this time – all my previous failures – have been because of you, Dean. I went to unfathomable lengths to protect you and your brother, sometimes in ways that you don't even know. _Everything _I have done has been for you, don't you see? This entire thing began as a way to rescue Sam from Hell. No – my attachment to you Winchesters has clouded my judgment long enough. You must either stand down, or I will be forced to smite you."

"Cas…" Dean's eyes brim with unshed tears, but his mouth is pulled into a terse, angry line.

"I do not want to hurt you. I never did. But you betray me in favor of one of your – _our_ – worst enemies? You allowed demons in here, Dean. Do you have any idea how many angels lost their lives today because of you? How few there were left to begin with? I don't understand – I don't understand why you can't trust me with this."

Castiel punctuates his sentence with a forlorn, disappointed look. Dean wants to respond, but the words hitch in his throat. At some point he manages, "I do trust you, Cas, but not like this…"

"Don't you see? For the greater good, I cannot allow you to stand in my way. Please don't force me to do something I don't want to."

Two things happen at exactly the same time: there's a loud clatter as Dean lets his Angel Blade slip out of his hand, and an errant gunshot cuts through the congested room.

A bloody hole blossoms in the center of Castiel's forehead. His eyes widen, along with everyone else's. In his shock, Dean inadvertently lets the tears slide down his cheeks and his green eyes become lucid. Claire gasps audibly, and Bobby lets out a low whistle.

Castiel teeters where he stands for a moment, before falling to the side like a tree in the wind. His collapse reveals his unsung assailant, who is still holding the smoking gun.

It's Sam.

* * *

**A/N: I hope you all liked it! Please don't hesitate to let me know what you think :)**


	2. Tuesday's Gone

**A/N: Thank you so so much to rosesapphire16, Nemu-Chan, and Tenderloins for reviewing! I'm so glad you're enjoying it so far! I hope you all like this chapter. Also, fair warning, there will be a few time jumps in this story - I hope no one finds it too bothersome!**

**Song: Tuesday's Gone by Lynyrd Skynyrd**

* * *

**CHAPTER 2**

**Tuesday's Gone**

_**3 DAYS EARLIER**_

_Sam stares down at his hands, stares down at Dean's blood slathered all over them._

'_I'm gonna kill him,' he thinks._

_He's thought this many times over the course of his life and never, never seriously, but Lucifer latches onto it all the same._

'_Remember when he showed up at Stanford, ruined your perfect plan and dragged you back into this? How he pulled you, screaming, away from Jess, when all you really wanted was to let the flames to consume you too? He should have left you. He could have stopped all of this. Remember when he sold his soul to bring you back from the dead, and lied to you, always lied? Remember when everyone died and then he died too and left you all alone? Remember when he beat the shit out of you, when you beat the shit out of each other, and he called you a monster knowing it was the thing you feared most?'_

_He shows him these memories on a loop, as his fists clobber his brother's face of their own volition._

_I want to stop I want to stop I want to stop, Sam prays, but he can't. Where is God? Why isn't he helping him?_

_Bones break against his bones. Somewhere along the way teeth scrape the flesh off of his knuckles._

_And all he says is, "It's okay, Sammy. I'm not gonna leave you."_

"What is it?" Dean flicks on the lights and Claire is typing furiously on the other side of the bed.

"Sam's having nightmares about Lucifer again."

. . .

Sam awakes in agony. Amelia rolls over against him and places one tiny hand over his heart, no doubt feeling it race.

"You okay?" she murmurs, her voice saturated with sleepiness.

Sam wipes the cold sweat from his upper lip and forces his breathing to regulate. "Yeah. Fine."

She's grown accustomed to this and he hates it. She doesn't even open her eyes anymore. Is he that much of a basket case that his night terrors have become commonplace? The answer is yes.

So far, Lucifer hasn't touched her. So far. He masquerades as everyone but not as her, which makes him think the worst is yet to come. Taking this one happiness away from him will be the final blow before he snaps completely, he reckons. He's pretty good at putting himself in Lucifer's shoes. He _was_ Lucifer's shoe at one point, and he knows how he thinks. He knows how he thinks, and so he knows that he is just biding his time.

Love is a fickle thing. If his love were pure, he would do what is best for her – he would leave. But his love is selfish, and so he stays. Or at least, he has stayed. But the voice in the back of his head that tells him to leave, that it's the best thing, nagging him for weeks now.

Dean texts him, calls him, leaves voicemails – all urging him to come back. He doesn't reply because he knows that whatever he says, his brother will see right through it – he will see that his resolve is tenuous, and he will find a way to dissolve it altogether. Dean is like a shark. He has a knack for sensing weakness, always has. So, it is safest not to respond. If he does make the decision, that hateful decision, he'll make it on his own.

Pushing these thoughts away, Sam snakes his arm around Amelia and buries his face in her mop of curly brown hair and tries, for the time being, to ignore how damaged he is.

In the morning, when he looks in the mirror, he can no longer see himself. The hazel eyes are his, the far-apart freckles are his, and the pointed nose is his. But still, the reflection seems warped. He wants to see himself, but he only sees a monster.

Lucifer left something behind inside of him. Some residue, some tainted handprint on his soul that haunts him still.

He didn't notice it at first. It started when he saw him on the TV, but he changed the channel and he was gone. He forgot about it. The second time it happened, he didn't leave. Then he heard him on the radio, but he changed the station and his voice disappeared. He tried to forget. The second time it happened, his voice remained. It became a pattern, seeing him everywhere, seeing him on billboards, seeing him in photographs, seeing him on the sides of buses, seeing him in his own face. But this he could ignore, this he could smother in an ordinary life.

He wasn't truly worried until Lucifer leapt off the page. First it was the mailman. In his blind horror, he nearly shot him dead on his doorstep. Then it was the cashier at the grocery store. And the repairman. And the doctor, that doctor Ames had wanted him to see. He didn't press charges – an occupational hazard, he'd said. Fast reflexes aren't a good thing when you're bat-shit insane. Makes sense. He tells people he's been to war, and he's not wrong.

They say the human brain represses certain memories as a defense mechanism – this is undoubtedly what his has done. But little by little, traces of his time in Hell are slipping through. He'd thought his memories from Purgatory were the worst of it, but he had been horribly, horribly mistaken – all that killing was just the tip of the iceberg. But the lingering fever-dreams from Hell, they're not memories – just quick lapses in his consciousness, reminding him of what he is and what he was.

The evil just keeps building inside him – first Azazel's blood, now this. He can't help but wonder how much extra it will take to tip the scales, or if they have already been tipped.

He wishes he had the memories instead. At least the line between past and present is clearly drawn; the line between fantasy and reality, however... Well, that one's more obscure.

. . .

_**NOW**_

"_Sammy_?"

Sam's mouth is open and it starts to form noiseless words, like some mystic incantation. Before any sound escapes him, Castiel rises to his feet, pressing the heel of his palm to his forehead. The wound knits together with such biological excellence that it's almost possible to see each cell regenerating itself.

"That was extraordinarily unpleasant," Cas croaks out.

Sam drops the Colt like it has scalded him.

"_Shit_," mutters Bobby.

Castiel spins around, trench-coat fluttering in the crowded air. "I'm glad you're here, Sam. It wouldn't be right to do this without you." He takes a step towards the younger Winchester; Dean's lip twitches and his hands form fists by his sides.

Sam's eyes are wide and frightened.

"I'm not going to hurt you," Castiel assures him, gently. "I'm not going to hurt any of you. I'll tell you what I told your brother, Sam: so long as you do not interfere with my work here, no harm will come to you. Attempting to kill me is a doomed, foolhardy pursuit, not an interference. Intercepting my work is an interference."

He cocks his head to the side, breathing ragged. "Your work?"

"Yes. I am your new God, and I will be a better one."

He vanishes abruptly, leaving Sam, Dean, Bobby, and Claire paralyzed in a miasma of failure.

Bobby's ever-sarcastic wit is inclined to crack a dismal joke about how poorly the whole ordeal went, but all words wilt in his throat.

Through their inability to speak, everyone seems to remember that Sam has shown up out of nowhere. One by one, each member of the party flits their eyes in his direction, until Dean bluntly questions, "What the hell are you doing here, Sam?"

Again, Sam mouths words but nothing comes out. Eventually he manages, "I got your messages."

"Oh," Dean sneers. His lip is curled into a spiteful grimace and he's suddenly fuming. "Did you? _Did you_ get the hundreds of thousands of texts and voicemails that I left you? Glad to hear it – that's just peachy."

"Dean – "

"No – just… just don't. Cas has gone off the deep end, Claire's having visions of you having dreams about friggen _Lucifer_, we're so fucked we're teaming up with _Crowley_, and _you're _too busy to pick up the goddamn phone?"

"Look, Dean, it's not like that, I swear – "

"I gotta hear through a fucking _vision_ of a _dream _that you're losing your marbles?"

Sam angles his head again, in that Chocolate Lab way he tends to employ. "Losing my marbles? Dean, I – "

"I know _all_ about Lucifer, Sammy. You didn't think that maybe – "

"Dean!" he exclaims, finally fed-up with his brother interrupting him. "I'm sorry, okay?"

Blankly, Dean stares at him for several beats. The atmosphere in the room is pulpy with tension as everyone awaits his reaction. He blinks several times in a row, before striding across the room to meet his brother.

Sam flinches as he grows nearer, ostensibly expecting him to throw a punch he undoubtedly thinks he deserves. But instead, Dean yanks him into an aggressive hug.

"Don't you _ever_ go AWOL like that again, you hear?" he orders into the shoulder of his coat.

Sam is noticeably taken aback, but stammers, "I-I won't. I'm sorry."

Dean tightens his grip for a fleeting moment, before releasing him abruptly and patting him on the bicep. He takes a measured step backwards and inspects his brother from head to toe for any signs of damage. Sam is tempted to smile because all his injuries are strictly internal, and he suspects he is aware of this. It's been a year, and he's still the same old overbearing Dean. His constancy is a wonder, really.

Bobby interrupts the boys' moment of consideration. "C'mere, ya idjit," he says, drawing Sam into a rough embrace. He claps him on the back affectionately and continues, "Last time I saw ya, you broke my goddamn neck, but I can't say that it made me miss ya any less."

Sam cringes in his arms. When they break apart, Claire approaches him sheepishly, feeling out-of-place. "Hi, Sam."

"Hey Claire," he replies, sparing her a feeble smile.

There's a pause, which Dean decides to fill with, "Where the hell have you been, anyway?"

"How much do you know from the visions?" he counters with a question of his own.

"Can we play catch-up somewhere else?" Bobby interjects, gesturing pointedly to their glum surroundings.

"Right," Dean murmurs, seeming to remember himself. "Let's go."

. . .

They're in Kansas, but it doesn't feel like home. It feels like a mausoleum adorned with the graves of everything they have ever loved.

Going to a diner directly after witnessing the birth of 'God' seems an absurdity that can only be explained by the rest of their lives. And here they are, the survivors of the Apocalypse, of this new and yet-unnamed holy event, of everything that could possibly happen to a person, slurping coffee.

Claire's legs are crossed primly as she watches the three men with unbridled interest. Dean is sitting beside her, and across from them are Sam and Bobby. Sam and Dean are locked in something of a staring contest – Dean looks angry and mean, while Sam looks scared and repentant. Bobby looks like the referee, ready to break up the fight.

She coughs and cracks the taut layer of uneasiness.

"I really am sorry, Dean," Sam bleats.

The golden-haired Winchester looks out the window because he can't stand to look at his brother anymore, but soon recharges. "You're gonna tell us what the hell happened."

Sam takes a sip of coffee, nodding as the black, bitter liquid blisters the roof of his mouth. Upon studying him, it's easy to discern that he's been wallowing under some tremendous stress. The skin around his eyes isn't purple or puffy with fatigue, but red with sickness, and his face is far gaunter than any of them remember it. The baby-fat has leached out, carving him into a shadow of himself. Even his hair seems duller, like some sort of luster has left his body.

"It's been tough," he confesses, stating the obvious. "When I left you, I wasn't sure where to go. I wandered around for a while."

He pauses, letting his eyes roll over his audience; they are hanging on his every word.

"One day," he continues, "I accidentally hit a dog. And… I stuck around to make sure it recovered, and the vet… Well, she and I got close… We ended up getting a house together."

"All this time," snaps Dean, "you've been playing house with a girl?"

Sam frowns pointedly, as if to say, _And you haven't?_ Instead he says, "Yeah. Anyway, her name was Amelia, and I really _really_ cared about her. You know, the heavy stuff."

"Why'd you leave?" Claire asks softly, dreamily.

He turns his attention to her, as though he just realized she was there too. "I had to," he replies cryptically.

"The hell does that mean?" is Bobby's waspish contribution. He'd appeared to be tuckered out after verbally (and creatively) berating Dean and Claire for joining forces with Crowley, but he's apparently rediscovered his whip of a tongue.

Sam looks pained. He hides his eyes to stare at his hands, still attached to the ceramic mug of coffee. "I'm not… I'm not all here. I've been having… hallucinations. It wasn't safe for me to be around her anymore."

At this, Dean's rigid veneer splinters. "You're seeing Lucifer?" he says, already knowing the answer. The edge is gone.

Sam nods again. "At first I could ignore him but then… Then it became harder to tell what was real. I didn't want to leave – I didn't…"

"What did you tell her?" Claire questions, voice spread thin. It's as if she's trying to gauge what to expect, as if she's expecting to drown in the wake of a Winchester's desertion. It's easier to prepare for despair when you know it's coming, or at least she hopes it is.

"The truth," is all he says, revealing nothing.

Claire falls silent and gazes into her coffee, like a gypsy trying to read tealeaves. She feels Dean's hand come to rest on her knee, but he doesn't look at her.

Those many years ago, when Dean plucked Sam from that fire, the two of them developed a secret language that persisted to the present-day. It is the most marvelous, rare, and inexplicable thing to be able to communicate with someone without words or even body language. To be able to do so is to glimpse into the very fabric of the universe, it seems, to cut to the core of something more profound than reality itself. It is like knowing how to read the soul of another human being. He's had this with Sam for as far back as his memory stretches.

Something like this is forming with Claire, now in its fledgling stages. They have transcended words, but not yet body language.

"Well, what are you planning on doing?" Dean asks eventually.

"I dunno. Just learn to deal with it, I guess. Like what everyone else does."

"There is no 'what everyone else does,'" Bobby counters dryly. "This ain't your run-of-the-mill PTSD – you're hallucinating about the goddamn Devil. Even 'Nam couldn't've been that bad."

"I have no other choice," he replies, mourning his sanity.

Dean studies him with a pinched expression. He seems vaguely unsurprised that he's got it this bad, but Sam doesn't know if this is due to his knowledge of his nightmares or otherwise. "Alright," he sighs finally, dropping his shoulders, paradoxically, like an enormous weight has been lifted. "We'll get through this, just like we always do. We'll help you through this, Sammy."

Claire nods vigorously in accordance and Bobby drives his fingers into the meat of his shoulder reassuringly.

"Thanks," he chokes, not-quite-relieved.

. . .

They drive all night to Bobby's under the ruse that they're going there to regroup. Claire knows this is a ruse because she goes with Dean and Sam goes with Bobby, which means he wants to talk. Talk about Sam. Talk about leaving her.

"So," he starts unimpressively.

"So," she echoes. Even with this one simple word, her heart sinks to the bottom of her feet, slogging her spirit down with it. In her neck, near her face, she can feel the distinct heat of dread pound inside her jugular. The fire pools in her ears, lighting them up to the color of her hair.

"Remember what you said? When Sam left?"

"I remember." How could she forget?

He looks at her but she's not looking at him. If she were to see him, she would see that he looks cursed.

"Claire –"

"I remember," she repeats. "Let's not make this harder than it has to be."

There's a beat of silence that even the radio's low hum can't fill. It stretches on like a tear in the fabric of reality, ripping the life they've built apart, ripping them apart. Eventually, "It's not forever," he says. His attempts to ease the blow are a farce, because she has already spiraled into despondency. "I'll see you all the time, I promise. It's just – right now, Sammy needs me…"

"I understand," she murmurs, and she does. She wants to say, _I need you too_, but it's ridiculous because she doesn't need him, she wants him, and it's selfish to want him when someone else _needs_ him. Plus, she knew this was coming the entire time, and if she cries about it now she has no one to blame but herself. But it hurts because she senses this is a bee-sting to him and a stab-wound to her. He can stand alone because he still has the things that make him himself, but she has lost all sense of identity within him, within the Winchesters. She's only their prophet, after all. To lose him will be to lose a part of herself – she hardly remembers who she was before this.

He reaches across the center console and grabs her hand. "All the time," he insists, voice saturated with intention that she knows is pure but still improbable.

She smiles, but her eyes are watery. "You'd better."

* * *

**A/N: Please let me know what you think! I tried to make the beginning part with Sam's thought a little stream-of-consciousnessy, but I hope it didn't end up being too confusing. Thanks for reading :)**


	3. Us and Them

**A/N: Thanks so much to Tenderloins, ImpalaLove, and Nemu-Chan for reviewing! Hope you all like this chapter!**

**Song: Us and Them by Pink Floyd**

* * *

**CHAPTER 3**

**Us and Them**

_**2 MONTHS LATER**_

"Did you love her?"

Electrified, Dean snaps his head to look at Sam, who's staring miserably out the car window and watching lights pass in the dark.

"What?" he grunts.

"Claire," he clarifies. The name rolls crisply off his tongue, sounding its meaning. "Did you love her?"

"Why're you asking questions like that," he bites exasperatedly, his hair-trigger temper igniting. It's out of the blue and makes Dean's blood bubble in his veins because it exhumes things he has tried very carefully to keep buried. The past tense, especially, picks at the threads of his shredded heart.

"I loved her," he continues distantly, as though he hadn't heard him. "Amelia, I mean. I loved her. We've never really each had someone at the same time, have we?" He says this like they can bond over their shared heartbreak, like this is just one more tragedy they have suffered together. Sam is unfazed by Dean's outraged reaction because he knows better than anyone that his brother's toeing the line between fury and depression is perfectly natural.

Proving his assumption, Dean takes one hand off of the steering wheel and brings his fingertips to skirt over the outline of his pursed lips.

"Look, man," he starts more sympathetically, "I know it's tough. But we gotta keep our eyes on the prize. Cas is still out there, and we gotta figure out a way to get through to him. You saw him last week – he looked like he was on the verge of spewing God-knows-what all over our shoes. He's not gonna be able to contain those things for much longer."

"All those years, Dean," Sam goes on, undeterred by his brother's attempt at diverting him, "All those years I thought, if I just had the _chance_ to be happy, I could do it, I could have a normal life. I was wrong. I was so wrong. The problem isn't our life, it's _me_."

"Stop it. That's not true, and you know it," Dean admonishes.

"But it is!" The noise that leaves his throat is half-laugh and half-sob, some sort of evil chimera that takes shape in the hollow of the black Impala. "It has to be – I tried, I tried to make it work, and I couldn't."

"It's only been two months, Sammy. We've got time, we've got time to fix it."

"You can't fix something that was never whole to begin with."

"Dammit, Sam! How many times, huh? How many times is one of us gonna have to talk the other down from the ledge? When we're not watching each other die, we're trying to talk each other out of it! It's gotta stop! This is gonna pass, this _feeling_ is gonna pass, just like everything else passes."

Sam wonders, sometimes, what it would be like if he'd been born before Dean. Would it be better? Worse?

Sam is the serious one, the one more like their father than anyone ever admitted. Surely he would have been an exact replica of that angry, militant man if he had been born first, if _he_ had been the one saddled with the responsibility of taking care of a kid brother. Dean would have been younger and freer and even more reckless – maybe even happy. But Sam, he would have been a shell – hard on the outside, but pummeled to dust by the weight of duty on the inside. Dean has so much feeling within him that it can endure the weight – Sam is not the same.

No, it is better this way, he decides.

"I mean it, Dean. I don't think this is something that'll ever go away. I can't just… I can't just reach inside and cut it out of me."

"Trust me. You gotta trust me. It'll be okay," is all he says.

And then they both know, know what the have always known – this word always heralds a lie.

. . .

Bobby slams shut a large, fraying textbook and proclaims, "… and _that's_ how ya trap a reaper."

Cross-legged, Claire leans back into the musty cushions of sofa in his den, cupping her hands to push errant wisps of hair away from her face and back into her ponytail. "Why are you telling me all this?" she asks in unconcealed boredom.

"'cause _someone's_ gotta know how to do this shit when I'm gone."

Her features scrunch into an expression of displeasure. "Why're you thinking about _that_?"

"'cause dyin' makes you acutely aware of your own mortality, that's why. And if those boys don't outlive me I swear on my mother's grave I'll wring their necks myself from the Great Beyond – someone's gotta be around to tell those meatheads what to do."

"Bobby…" she starts gently.

"Save it, sweetheart. You're my best and only option when it comes to takin' an apprentice."

"You've been doing this for decades," she says. "I'll never be able to catch up."

"I got a feelin' we'll have loadsof time to make up for that."

Claire bites her lip and peers out the window. They haven't seen the boys in months and, apart from a couple of phone calls and a handful of visions, she's had no contact with either Winchester.

"Sorry," Bobby says a bit less thornily. "I forgot that was a sore spot."

"It's okay," she replies. She stands, brushing invisible flecks of dirt off of her pants and shaking the heartache out of her head. Her hair catches the sun and she looks to be aflame. Bobby gives her a half-assed smile.

She is shamming that she's not in love with Dean Winchester and, tacitly, everyone is going along with it. She can't figure out why, but she's grateful for it. The word _love_ jangles around solely in her mind, which makes it easier to pretend it's just a figment of her imagination.

After a year of torrid passion and pillow-talk and equally torrid fights and make-ups, they never said that word to one another. It's the not-saying it, she supposes, that lets her know it's real. To be able to understand her own emotions so vividly without ever having vocalized them has allowed her to construct an alternate reality, the one that she lives in, where he isn't all she ever thinks about.

"Do you usually go this long without seeing them?"

Bobby pauses, measuring his response with precision. "Depends," he eventually settles upon. "Sometimes I don't see 'em for months, sometimes I can't get 'em to leave. It depends on what they're dealin' with."

She nods in comprehension.

He usually doles advice out sparingly, but he can't help but feel that Claire is in dire need of it and he has to admit she's grown on him. So he continues, "He ain't gonna forget about you. Dean ain't the type – once you're in, you're in forever."

Again, she only nods, wishing she believed him.

But the truth is, she is forgettable. Her brothers forgot about her, then her parents. It only follows logically that Dean should be next to raze her from his thoughts.

Speaking of her parents, she's only spoken to them three times since she initially left with Dean. You'd think the loss of two children would make them cling all the more tightly to the only one remaining, but apparently the opposite is true. Life has worn them down to the point of complacency, to the point where they have lost the will to fight off fate as it ravages them. She often wonders if she should never have gone back to that microscopic town, if her presence there truly was as meaningless to them as it now seems.

But she supposes destiny has its way of sorting things into place.

. . .

"I found on lead on something weird goin' on in Colorado," Dean announces immediately upon entering their ramshackle motel room, slamming a newspaper down in front of his brother.

Sam is hunched over the table, chomping on a turkey club. He looks particularly enormous as his spine forms a capital-C curve in the chair. He peers up at him, lettuce poking out of the left corner of his mouth.

"A bunch of miracles," the elder Winchester goes on, because the younger one hasn't asked. "Like, hundreds in this one hospital. It's gotta be Cas."

"He's healing people? You think that's a bad thing?"

Dean's expression is impassive. "Did I forget to mention that a local priest was found with his eyes burned out and his internal organs turned to mush? Cops looked into it – turns out he'd been bad-touching altar-boys for close to twenty years."

"Again, him being dead is a bad thing?"

"Cas can't go around killing whoever he feels like! Sure, now it's pedo-priests, but where does it stop? Who's next, little old ladies who don't pay the Blockbuster late fees? What gives him the right to decide who deserves to live and who deserves to die?"

"He's _God_, Dean," Sam points out wryly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Plus," he adds, "no one uses Blockbuster anymore."

"He ain't God," the other scoffs, pacing further into the room. "He's an angel who got way too big for his britches."

Sam stares meditatively into the empty space across the table from him, before remarking, "Ever hear that story about Icarus flying too close to the sun?"

"I don't wanna hear your nerd-babble right now," he stunts him.

He grows quiet once more, staring off. He seems to be lost in his own mind. Dean waves a hand in front of his face, suddenly alarmed by his brother's behavior. "Sammy? Earth to Major Tom?"

Sam gives his shaggy head a quick, spastic shake and crunches the wax paper from his sandwich in his fist. "S-sorry."

"What the hell was that?"

"It's happening again," he replies enigmatically.

"_What's _happening?"

"The hallucinations. Lucifer… he keeps talking about Icarus. That's why I mentioned it. Sometimes if I acknowledge what he's saying he stops."

"How often does that happen? The talking-inside-your-head, I mean?"

Sam stares him dead in the eyes with a newfound lucidity. "All the time."

. . .

It feels odd living alone again after a year of perpetually close quarters. Claire has taken up residence in the local sheriff's – Sheriff Mills' – cabin, just outside of Sioux Falls. Apparently she owed Bobby and the Winchesters a favor and, perhaps surprisingly, everyone unanimously agreed that Bobby needed his space. She only met the Sheriff once, but she seemed quite nice.

The cabin is nice too, but it's way too big for her. It's built for a family. Sheriff Mills doesn't have a family, but Claire can't help but think she used to once.

Being alone so much of the time oscillates between being peaceful and being eerie. Sure, she visits Bobby nearly every day, but there are still a great many hours that she spends only with the stray, freakishly white cat that meandered in through the basement to escape the creeping chill of mid-November in South Dakota and never left. She's only ever had dogs and she can't tell if it's male or female, so she just calls it Spot because it has a huge charcoal-gray spot over the right side of its face, the only thing marring its pristine whiteness.

Anyway, the cat isn't very conversational.

There were always so many words flying around when she was with Dean. Words flying from her mouth, words flying from his, words flying onto pages. Thinking back, they fought almost constantly when they weren't trying to preserve their lives. Luckily they were also trying to preserve their lives almost constantly. But there would be lulls, and inevitably heated arguments ensued. For someone so rock-steady, Dean was remarkably volatile when it came to his emotions. There was so much passion swirling inside him that it could be refracted in a thousand different ways. Because of this, these disputes, though frequent, had the lifespan of a fruit-fly and, very soon after all the paper-ripping and object-throwing, their issues would be resolved with murmured apologies and, occasionally, tears. Dean hated to see her cry.

But now she has no one to shout at, no one to hold her when the swell of fire encroaches on her brain. Still, the visions aren't nearly as difficult as they once were. By increasing her daily whiskey consumption to something dangerously close to the standard definition of alcoholism, she combats fire with fire and has been able to manage her burden. Now they're more of a twinge of pain, like bruises that only hurt when you poke at them.

Sort of like the thought of Dean.

. . .

In Colorado they start at the hospital, trolling the halls predatorily, like twin sharks in search of chum. What's missing in the analogy is that they know the chum can kill them with a snap of his fingers. There isn't really a word to describe being the aggressor and the potential victim all at the same time; maybe it's called being human.

They meet him in the basement, and what they can't appreciate is that it was in a place very much like this that their father traded his life for his oldest son's.

"I guess I should've known you two wouldn't relent," Castiel sighs, world-weary. Something is wrong in his voice – something has changed since they last saw him. The light is dim but they can see as much as they need to.

He looks violently ill. The flesh sags off his bones, raw and sizzling with the inability to contain the power trapped within it. The skin is peeling away, like bark flaking from a dying pine tree. He reeks – even through all the smells of a hospital – he _reeks_ of something distinctly familiar to them: a rotting corpse.

The boys are concerned.

"Look at you, Cas," Dean grieves. "You're sick. These things are killing you."

Castiel stands imperceptibly straighter. "I'm fine, Dean," he says, convincing no one, not even himself.

"He's right," Sam chimes in. "Your vessel can't take it anymore. The same thing happened to Lucifer when his vessel wasn't strong enough to hold him."

"I must complete my work."

"Cas," Dean implores, "_please_, I'm begging you. Just give it up."

Castiel smiles melancholically, then coughs. Something black that's not blood sprays the concrete floor in perfectly circular droplets of varying sizes. He stumbles, and falls to his knees.

The two brothers rush towards him, forgetting their weapons. "Cas?!" they both call, out of sync.

As they try to steady him, he clutches one of their hands in each of his for something more than stability. Deliverance is beyond him and he has done the unforgivable, but he must – he _must_ – convey his penitence.

His organs – which he doesn't truly need – boil inside him, now some sort of soupy liquid. If he were human he would already be dead, but he is not and so he persists for just a blink longer.

"Maybe… Maybe you were right. There's something… There's something inside of me," he gasps. Yes, his organs are gone, and in their place some new foreign, stringy tissue is weaving into a shape of its own, more alive than he is inside the cavity of his chest. It's excruciating and he feels himself – not his vessel, not Jimmy Novak – deteriorate.

"Just let it go," Dean pleads. "Let it go."

Castiel's heavenly blue eyes peer up at him, glittering, and suddenly he looks no more intimidating than a frightened child. His chapped lips part only to utter, "I can't."

"No, Cas," Dean cries futilely, "you can, you have to." He grips his hand crushingly, as if by holding it he can force him to hold onto life too.

"I'm sorry, Dean, Sam. I'm sorry. Before I die, I want you to know that I'm sorry. I only ever meant to make things better."

"I know, I know," Sam chants, but Dean yells, "Stop it!" illuminating a difference between them that makes Castiel want to smile fondly. But he can't.

"It's too late."

And all the while Lucifer's singing, _Icarus' wings are melting._

* * *

**A/N: Please let me know what you think! I promise the whole story won't be that depressing.**


	4. Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall

**A/N: Thank you so much to rosesapphire16, Tenderloins, Nemu-Chan, and Guest for reviewing the last chapter! I hope you'll like like this one!**

**Song: Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall by Simon and Garfunkel (wow that was long to type out)**

* * *

**CHAPTER 4**

**Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall**

_**A MONTH LATER**_

It's winter now. Claire read a line in a book, once; it said, "Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair."* She imagines the author was talking about South Dakota, or at least somewhere close.

Whenever Dean and Sam come to Bobby's, they don't really seem like themselves. The loss of Cas has smashed them up inside like a semi-truck. When they come Dean and Claire are never alone, and when he talks to her – those fleeting moments, when her heart flops in her ribcage – he looks right through her.

But she, she sees his face everywhere now. On the news, mostly, on someone else, a monster. And when she sees it in front of her, it seems equally artificial.

It's all _Leviathans, Leviathans, Leviathans, they killed Cas_, as though Cas had had nothing at all to do with it.

To speak against Castiel is blasphemy, because he's dead. If he were still alive, he would still be despicable. Funny how things work out like that.

Claire wonders why Dean was never so distraught at the notion of killing Castiel as he is now. She supposes reality and theory are two starkly different things, but still. He's dead, but it wasn't like they never suspected he might die. _Despair is easier to cope with when you know it's coming, right? _That's what she'd always thought, but now that she's wiser she thinks maybe not.

These monsters, these new ones (new to everyone, not just her – a rarity), cannot be killed, or so it appears.

But she agrees that the Leviathans are terrifying and must be stopped, even if she's never seen one up close. The only problem is she doesn't agree with anything else.

Bobby goes out on hunts with them, all the time nowadays, but they never let her come.

"Do you have _any _idea how royally screwed we are?" Dean shouts at her. "The three of us are veteran hunters and none of us has a fucking _clue_ where to start – there's _no way_ _in hell _you're tagging along!"

Bobby and Sam are silent because they agree but don't want to further incite her. That said, the domestic fights don't even make them flinch anymore – but they used to, they used to wince and duck for cover every time the two were in the same room together. Both have a habit of hurling things. Thank God, they never resort to the alternative – they never touch each other.

The intimacy of the Winchesters' arguments is usually what causes onlookers to feel most discomforted, but Dean and Claire give this pairing a run for its money. They spit and claw at each other in a way that, frankly, can't be considered functional or healthy. Not that anything is ever functional or healthy, but still Sam never imagined he'd see his brother fight with anyone other than him so viciously.

"They say there's a fine line between love and hate," Bobby mutters, directing the sound at Sam with the back of his hand, "But Jesus H. Christ."

Sam snorts, but is vaguely concerned that one of them might bring on a stroke.

"Bobby," he murmurs, hands folded, "you ever think maybe – I can't believe I'm saying this… I like her, I do. I like her a lot. But you ever think maybe… maybe she isn't good for him? And I know, I know I pushed him into this in the first place, but just… Just hear me out. I know what it's like, I've had girlfriends, I've been in love – that's not how you're supposed to act when you care about someone."

The older of the two stays hushed for a long while, collecting his thoughts. "I ain't gonna deny that what those two got is one of the most crazy, messed-up things I've seen in my entire life. You hear about stuff like this, but I'd never actually seen it. Those two will tear each other apart long before anyone tears them apart. But underneath it, Claire's a good girl and Dean's a good guy."

"But I've never seen him like this before," Sam frets.

Bobby gives him a sagacious look. "I have."

Meanwhile, in Bobby's kitchen, Claire shrieks, "What am I supposed to do, sit here and twiddle my thumbs while I wait for you guys to come back?!"

"Yes! That's exactly what you're supposed to do!"

"Well that's bullshit! No one taught me all this shit for nothing!" The high pitch of her voice makes the profanity sound like a child's first attempt at swearing.

"You don't understand, you don't understand," is the mantra he always reverts to.

And Sam and Bobby can't hear them anymore, which means the tornado has passed.

"Then _let me_."

And then there's a dull quiet because they will never let her and she thinks, with a fearful jolt, that she doesn't really know any of them at all.

But she does, or at least she knows Dean. She knows it's _I'm not gonna lose you too_ holding him back. But they've been together a year-and-a-half and there hasn't been any progress – they're still in the very same situation they started in: him running away from her and her chasing after him. They've devolved, really, because what they have cannot be considered a relationship when all they ever do is bicker.

Trying to persuade them is like trying to convince concrete to dance, but still she gives it a shot. And in the end she fails like she knew she would, left alone in an antiquated fog of sexism and dusty books. Without Bobby she drifts further away from everything, and when they go into hiding she suspects she may never hear from them again. Cutting attachments with her is, apparently, of paramount importance to the mission, because she is a weakness and she is weak.

Even her visions are visiting her with less frequency, as though they too know that her role in the story is coming to an end.

. . .

There's snow on the ground, icy rain scarring it with pinpricks, and Sam finds himself in an empty warehouse in Cleveland with Dean.

The trouble is, though, it's not Dean. It never was, and he doesn't know for how long.

Lucifer's got him – he was that last buoy he clung to in the storm, and Lucifer's sunken him. And he didn't even notice until now.

Another Dean appears, eyes wild.

"Sam? What're you doing?" it demands hastily.

Acting reflexively, like a spooked animal, he waves his pistol at the figure. _No _he mouths over and over again. "It-it can't be. You're not real. I-I thought I was with you, Dean."

"Whoa, Whoa! Okay…" says his alleged brother, raising his palms in surrender. Dean takes a cautious step towards him and Sam's grip tightens on the trigger, but still he approaches. "Well… I'm here now." He modulates his voice to remain calm, and even through the murk of insanity Sam picks up on it.

"No, no, no! I thought – I thought I was with you the whole time. How can I know? How can I know it's you? How can I ever know anything for sure?" He presses the butt of the gun to his forehead and screws his eyes shut, willing everything around him out of existence. He points the gun at 'Dean' again, not knowing who it is and hating that he doesn't, hating _him_, wanting to lobotomize himself. He could do it now, he thinks. He could end it – he's not scared. He has the gun. He chucks it under his chin.

_Atta boy. Now you're getting the hang of it,_ Lucifer exclaims gleefully.

"GET OUT OF MY HEAD!" he screams at something Dean cannot see.

"SAMMY, NO!" The noise that rips from his voice-box is technically two human words, but any living creature would recognize it for what it truly is: a howl of desperation.

"It's better this way, Dean, it's better." His hand shakes but the still-hot barrel stays glued to his jaw. "I'm gonna hurt someone, it's just a matter of time. I almost just killed _you_," he sobs. "And-and I still don't even know if you're who you say you are."

"But you didn't," Dean urges him, voice broken, "And I am. It's me, Sammy, it's _me_." Emboldened and fraught, he takes another stride towards him.

Sam flings his aim back at him. "Stay away," he warns.

"Okay listen, Sam. Let me prove it to you. Let me just try."

He doesn't reply, which Dean seizes as his window of opportunity.

"Give me your hand," he instructs.

Sam cocks his head, features contorted in quizzical anguish. "What?"

"Your _hand_," he repeats – this time it's not an instruction, but an order uttered in their father's long-unused military tone.

Trembling violently, his left hand, bandaged, extends. At the same time the gun lowers slowly, in jerky increments.

Dean takes his hand in both of his own, staring at his brother intently. "You see this cut? You see it?" He drives his thumb cruelly into giving flesh, watching a rose bloom beneath it. Blood stains the white gauze like stigmata. "This pain is different, different than what you felt in Hell – I know it is, I was there too. _This_ real. I was there when you got it – I sewed it up myself."

Sam doesn't know when Dean took the gun from him, but there's a certain relief in the realization that it's gone, that the cool weight has left his uninjured hand.

"_I _am your flesh-and-blood brother. I'm the only one who can legitimately kick your ass in real-time, you understand? You got out. We got you out. You gotta make that stone number one, and build on it." What really sells it, though, is that this incarnation of his brother has the most horrified look on his face, a look that could never be manufactured, not even by Lucifer.

Sam is digging his own finger into the ruptured wound. "Yeah," he nods frantically. "Yeah, okay."

Dean echoes, "Okay."

They stand there, just staring at one another, and Dean's eyes are swimming with a kind of fear that stems from utter helplessness. They're drowning, both of them, and he has no idea how to get to safety. He doesn't know how to kill the Leviathans, he doesn't know how to help Sam, and they're just sinking, _sinking_ to the bottom of the ocean. If he could only break the surface of the water he thinks they could survive, but it's all black and he doesn't even know which direction is up. Maybe, _maybe,_ if he only had to deal with one problem or the other, he could fight his way to air. But right now he has stones tied to both his feet.

. . .

The snow makes her yearn for warmer weather. In the desolation, her memory withdraws to the summer, when everything smelled like pollen and life. It skittered by so quickly she barely had time to notice it, but certain days stuck in her periphery vision.

There was that picnic in Missouri, for instance – it was between cases, and the first time in a long time that she glimpsed happiness. She remembers every instant of it…

She was lying in a dehydrated field. The sun heated her skin in prickly ripples until it burned it, leaving its mark on her quicker than the average person. It hung over them by an invisible thread, drooping and overripe as the night tried sluggishly to climb up from beyond the horizon. An indistinct fluff of greenery encompassed them, blocking out that golden disc, but not its rays. And in the trees hid legions of trilling cicadas.

Watching clouds sail across the sky like uncharted continents, she asked him, "How long do we have?"

He was sitting next to her ear, knees drawn close to his chest. "We have the weekend," he answered, as though it was forever.

She rolled on her side to look at him and her hair caught on the blades of grass that matched his eyes. When she truly studied him, she was awestruck. The sun granted him a halo.

If she ever intended to tell him how she felt, now would have been the perfect time.

He peered down at her with an expression identical to the one she didn't know she was wearing. She clasped his hand in hers, running her thumb over his knuckles; her eyes followed her hand – their hands – and the lashes cast thick shadows on her fairylike cheekbones.

"The next time we do this, we should go to the beach."

"Alright," he said, entranced. "We will. Someday soon. We'll go to California, to those beaches all the greats wrote songs about."

She flitted her gaze up to his face, this time with an exalted grin, straight teeth gleaming. He smiled back without showing his.

He kissed her and it felt like a dream.

But they never did make it to the beach.

. . .

_**SEVERAL MONTHS LATER**_

The next time Claire sees Dean is under bizarre circumstances.

She receives a call from an unknown number and leaps for it, some mystical, abstract part of her mind sensing that it's not just another telemarketer.

"Hello?" she rushes.

"…Claire?"

She tries but does not succeed in masking the elation in her voice. "Dean? Is that really you?" But her excitement fades away quickly when all the pain he's caused her floods back to the forefront of her memory.

"Yeah, it's me." The hesitance in his tone accentuates just how long they've gone without speaking to one another.

"What's up? Is something the matter?"

"Yeah, um… So, Sam…"

"What happened? Is he okay?"

"He's not hurt," he says slowly, "but something's wrong with him."

"Wrong? How do you mean wrong? I saw what happened in Cleveland –"

"Not like that," he cuts her off. "He – uh – he got married."

Claire nearly drops the phone.

"Hello?" comes Dean's voice.

"Did you say _married_?"

"Yeah, I dunno… Look, the Leviathan stuff has cooled off for the time being and I… I could use some back up."

"You want me to meet you?"

"Only if you want – I mean, I could call someone else…" He sounds stilted. She imagines him scratching the back of his head uncomfortably on the other end of the line.

She pauses, considering saying no. After how he treated her and how he abandoned her for weeks upon weeks upon _weeks_, she knows he doesn't deserve her help. She _wants _to say no, to make him realize that she's not like everyone else, she's not someone he can toss away and pick back up when he needs her for something. But… but she can't – she's not strong enough.

"Claire? You still there?"

"Yeah," she murmurs, "Yeah, I'll meet you. Where are you?"

"Vegas."

Her blood runs cold and for an instant she thinks she must have misheard him. Vegas. _Vegas_, of all places.

"I know," he fills the static. "It's the, um, annual pilgrimage. With Sam's problems, I think these sort of ritual things are good to keep him grounded, you know? But to be honest, you're the first one I thought of when I got here."

"That was almost two years ago."

"I know. Can you believe it?"

"It feels like it," she says glacially.

"_Claire_…"

"I'll be there by tomorrow."

. . .

When he picks her up at the airport he tries to kiss her but she turns her face and shimmering eyes away. They get into some alien, stolen Ford quickly, before anyone can spot him, and he doesn't notice the unshed tears.

"Don't be like this, Claire," he pleads as they drive.

Looking at his profile and his eyes so captivated by the road, it's easy to forget that any time has passed.

But then she makes herself remember, remember those frigid nights she spent alone in a cabin in South Dakota, hoping, _praying_ to hear just a word from him. And all there was was silence.

"I don't want to argue, Dean. Let's just work the case," she replies quietly.

"I missed you," he tells her, like it means something.

She smiles but it's not really a smile because it expresses a tremendous sadness. "I missed you too." _More than you know._

He brings her to an apartment complex, but before they exit the car he briefs her, "So, here's the back-story: ever since those goddamn Leviathans paraded around as me and Sam painting the walls with blood, apparently there's been some huge online movement of people we've saved defending us. This girl… we met her pretty soon after it happened and she went crazy over Sam – like, Fatal Attraction level crazy. I think she must've used some sort of love potion on him and convinced him to get hitched."

"She… she knows about you guys?"

"She doesn't know everything, but she knows a lot. It's insane what you can find online nowadays."

Momentarily releasing her grudge, she smirks fondly to herself. "You only say that because you're still living in 2007." But really, Dean's living an in era he never experienced for himself – his dad's era, when all the men were drafted and the women stayed home to cry over them.

But for now they've agreed on a temporary cease-fire in their feud; he carries a waffle iron under his arm as they trek up the stairs, and it's hard to be angry with him or even take him seriously when he looks so outlandishly domestic.

The girl who answers the door is short and blonde. Sam stands a least a foot taller beside her, looking stupidly happy.

"Congratulations!" Dean says in the fakest, most saccharine tone she's ever heard come out of his mouth.

"Aw, Dean, you finally came around!"

The girl takes the box (which is nearly as large as she is) from him with a grin, and Sam wraps Claire up in a forceful hug.

"Claire, I'm so happy you made it! I presume Dean's filled you in? We would have invited you to the ceremony, but it was such short notice, you know?"

Now Claire is five-hundred-percent certain Dean's hunch is correct. "Yeah, yeah, don't worry about it," she prattles, patting him stiffly on the back.

"Sammy, who's this?"

Sam releases Claire and her feet hit the floor with a wobbly thud.

"Oh! Sorry, baby, how silly of me – this is Claire, Dean's girlfriend. Claire, this is Becky."

'Becky' raises her translucent brows. "I didn't know Dean had a girlfriend," she says slyly.

The two are twitching like mad, feeling cornered and awkward in the doorway.

"They're shy about it," Sam teases. "They don't like 'labels.'" He uses air-quotes for the last word, even though neither of them has ever mentioned anything _ever_ about labels.

Claire and Dean share a furtive, uneasy glance. _What the fuck_, it says.

"Come in, come in!" squeals Becky, ushering them inside. "Would you like some tea?"

Dean opens his mouth to reply, but Sam answers for them. "I think they would love some, Becks."

The three sit at the dining room table in the rather spacious apartment as Becky fusses in the kitchen.

"Sam," Dean starts cautiously, "how're you doing?"

"I'm _fine_, Dean," he scoffs petulantly. "I don't get why you can't just believe that I'm happy."

"Because not too long ago you were still pining over Amelia."

Sam looks panicky and he shushes him with haste. "Becky doesn't like to hear about that."

"You told her about her?" Claire asks incredulously.

Sam nods. "We both agreed to be completely honest with each other. About everything."

"About _everything_?" Dean interrogates.

Again, Sam nods earnestly. "We can trust her, Dean."

"Jesus. Shit. Motherf-"

"What are you all whispering about?" rings Becky's shrill falsetto. She sets a tea tray down on the table and distributes the mugs. "Sugar?"

"I think I've had enough sugar for today, thanks," Dean drawls. Claire kicks him under the table. It's just like old times.

"So," she begins, "How long have you been together?"

Claire and Dean start rambling at exactly the same time; instead of stopping so that one person can speak, they each try to talk over the other. What results is a jumbled mess of unintelligible babble.

"Wow," Becky says after giving their ridiculous display a moment to sink in, "you really weren't kidding about the shy thing, were you Sammy?"

Sam smirks infuriatingly and Dean says, "It's complicated," with a plastered-on smirk of his own. "What I'm more interested in, Becky, is how marital life is treating you and my little brother."

"It's wonderful!" she gushes. Suddenly solemn, she goes on, "And Dean, if you're worried about your and Sam's work, don't – I won't tell a soul. In fact, Sam's been showing me the ropes of the trade."

Bug-eyed, Dean gapes at Sam. "You're _what_?!"

"You taught Claire!" he defends childishly.

The elder Winchester covers his face with his hands.

"Uh, what I think Dean means to say is this is a very dangerous line of work – I don't know if you would ever want to enter it voluntarily," Claire supplies, a bit more diplomatically.

"I know," Becky responds, "And Sammy-poo explained all that to me. But I want to be able to understand _all_ of him. Even the messy parts." She places one teensy hand on his kneecap and they gaze lovingly into each other's eyes.

At this, even Claire feels a little sick, and Dean totally loses his nerve. "_Really_? Sammy-poo? Mother of God, you've gotta be kidding me." He stands abruptly, nearly toppling the chair over in his wake.

"Wait!" Becky calls after him. "Sam, can I tell him?" she defers to her new husband.

"Tell me what?"

"I hate to see you fight," she murmurs, her crazy eyes training in on Dean. "We – we're working on a case here. We think it might be a Crossroads Demon."

Dean balks at his brother for what feels like the millionth time in the past two days. "You've been working a case without me? With _her_?"

Sam stands too, matching his brother. "_She_ is my _wife_," he snaps. "And yes, we've been working a case – I knew it would upset you, that's why I didn't tell you."

"Oh, so now you're keeping things from me? Awesome."

"Look, life goes on, Dean. Once upon a time it was you and me, but things change. People change."

Dean angles his chin out, hurt masquerading as arrogance. "Yeah. I see that."

"What I mean is, people fall in _love_. The story goes on, but my story continues with Becky. And yours – well… I'm sure yours continues with Claire."

"What about the Leviathans, Sam?! Have you forgot about that massive shit-storm rolling in?"

"I have faith you and Claire and Bobby can deal with that without me," he answers.

Dean inhales and exhales steadily, moderating his breathing to keep his temper in check, and pinches the narrow bridge of his nose. _He's drugged he's drugged he's gotta be drugged, _he meditates. Then, forcing an insincere smile onto his face and closing his eyes for two blinks, he finally replies, "Okay. Alright. If that's how you feel, we'll be on our way – we won't bother you anymore."

Chasing outside after him, Claire grabs Dean's jacket and says, "You can't take what he says seriously. He's clearly under some kind of spell."

"I know. I know," and he does. He stares only at the pavement in the parking lot, studying the crisscrossing chasms filled with bubblegum and cigarette butts.

"And with a Crossroads Demon in town? Didn't you say she fell in love with Sam the first time she met him?"

"Yeah. No, you're right. There's no such thing as coincidence. He just… He just seemed so happy, didn't he?"

And Claire doesn't know what to say.

* * *

***This is a line from Jeffrey Eugenides' book _The Virgin Suicides_, and if you've never read it go read it NOW.**

**A/N: Sorry again for all the time jumps. I'm trying to give this a sort of snapshot-feel, but it's hard to follow the plot-line (loosely - a lot of it is out of order) without getting too bogged down in the actual show (which is obviously fine for some stories, it's just not what I'm trying to do here). Just a few more time jumps, I promise! Also, you'll notice that I took some scenes from the show - I didn't transcribe them word for word or exactly the way they happened. I kept the Dean/Sam scene in the warehouse mostly the same because that scene - in my opinion - is one of the best in the entire series. But I didn't want to just copy what the show did - where's the fun in that? You guys already know what happened.**

**Also, just as an aside, I read somewhere that Dean's character is based on Dean Moriarty from Kerouac's _On the Road_, and I thought the whole tumultuous romance thing should go along nicely with that little tidbit.**

**Anyway sorry for such a massive author's note! I have a tendency to ramble. Please let me know what you thought of the chapter! It's a long one, but I'm probably not going to be able to update for the next couple of days, so hopefully this will tide you over**


	5. All Along the Watchtower

**A/N: Thank you so so so much to ToriDW317, ImpalaLove, and Tenderloins for reviewing! You guys are amazing! I hope everyone likes this chapter.**

**Song: All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix**

* * *

**CHAPTER 5**

**All Along the Watchtower**

After resolving the Crossroads Demon case in Las Vegas (surprise surprise, Crowley wants them to clean up yet another mess for him), Dean, Sam, and Claire head back up to South Dakota.

It's a long drive, filled with relentless teasing.

"_Sammy-poo, Sammy-poo_," Claire and Dean croon in unison, descending into cackles like giddy teenagers on the way back from the senior prom. They're almost able to forget they're jammed shoulder-to-shoulder in a stranger's sea-foam-green jalopy.

"Yuck it up, guys!" Sam shouts from the bitch-seat in the back, his long legs taking up the entire rear of the car. "Next time one of you is in a bind, I'm posting that shit on YouTube!"

"What the hell is a YouTube?"

"Oh, Dean," Claire sighs, her heart surging suddenly with affection for him. She twines his fingers with his, and he knows in an instant – as their hands stay stacked on the stick shift – that the fight is over. It makes no sense to Sam and when he sees it he doesn't understand, but Dean does and that's all that matters.

This is the problem with their relationship – there's no balance in it. To say it's hot and cold with be an enormous oversimplification. Like addicts, they experience euphoric highs and unimaginable lows, but the highs are high enough to keep them trapped in the precarious cycle, winding 'round and 'round like a derailed carnival ride. There's no escape, and there's no logic to it. And this reality is becoming apparent even to them.

Right now, though, all he wishes is that they could be alone, if only for this one night. But killing Leviathans is what's important, and they don't have any time to waste in motels.

At around 2 AM, with Claire taking her turn at sleep in the back, Sam asks, "So what, are you two on again?"

"I wasn't aware that we were ever off," he murmurs lamely in response.

"Really? That's all you got?"

"Look," says Dean, knowing they were gonna have to address this at some point, "I get how it must seem..."

"It seems toxic," he retorts, surprising even himself with the bluntness of the statement.

Dean winces at the word – for Sam to say something like this, it must really be true. It's hard to ascertain the magnitude of a hurricane when you're in the eye of it.

"Cas…" He pauses, trying to shake the memory of a snakelike _Cas is gone_ leaving his friend's blood-soaked marionette body, before continuing, "Cas once told me something along the lines of what me and Claire have could be 'overwhelming' because she's our prophet. I figure this is what he was talking about… When it's good…" he clicks his tongue and leers suggestively over the steering wheel, "_man_, is it good."

"But when it's bad," Sam finishes cautiously, "you destroy half of poor Bobby's kitchen."

"Yeah…" he acknowledges in embarrassment. "But y'know, I've been thinking about it – I ain't the first person to shack up with my prophet."

"_What?_" Dean has said some off-the-wall shit before, Sam thinks, but he can't even begin to fathom the rationale for this one.

"Yeah, they say Jesus and Mary Magdalene did the dirty, and everyone was so scandalized by it they cut her gospel out of the Bible," he states eruditely, like he is an expert on the topic.

"You have been reading _way_ too much Dan Brown," Sam mutters.

"Dan Brown? Nah, I just watched that movie…" He snaps his fingers as though in doing so he can summon the title, and he's talking out of the side of his mouth like he always seems to do when he's bullshitting or fighting back a grin or both.

"The Da Vinci Code," the other assists.

"Bingo. That's the one."

"Are you really comparing yourself to _Jesus_, Dean?"

"Hey, if the sandal fits…"

"It doesn't!"

"All I'm sayin' is I'm in good company."

Sam snorts to disguise a chuckle; he doesn't want to encourage his brother. But Dean sees through it, like he always does, and shoots him that slanting grin.

Tone more serious, Sam asks, "… So, is she coming with us now?"

Dean's brief respite of good-humor slides away and he sighs wearily. "I dunno, man. I don't know what to do. These past few weeks it's been clear that the Leviathans are running fucking _everything_, and it scares the shit out of me because it means they definitely have the resources to track Claire down. But on the other hand, taking her with us would put her directly in the line of fire. I just – I don't know."

"Dean," Sam starts slowly, as though he is about to propose a novel idea, "why don't you just let her choose for herself?"

The other's line of sight jumps around the windshield, as though he can find some revelation hidden in the darkness between the dimly illuminated tree trunks. "It's just so hard," he says candidly. "After Cas… I can't _afford _to lose anyone else Sam, you get that?"

"But you can't build a stone tower and lock her away in it. I know you think it's what's best, and I think she knows that too. But you of all people understand that you can't make decisions for someone else."

"I know…" he murmurs. "You're right."

The next night, they stop for gas at a vacated station on the outskirts of Sioux Falls, which gives Claire and Dean the first chance to talk alone in months. Sam, knowing he should allow them their privacy, takes suspiciously long inside the convenience store while they sit on that hideous sea-foam-green hood, staring at the shimmering stars painted on a blanket of indigo.

They used to do this all the time.

"Claire," he starts, "this… this is some serious stuff – almost Apocalypse-level serious, I'd say. We're gonna gank the Leviathans as soon as we know how to, but first we need to figure out what they're up to. If Crowley's scared, I'm fucking terrified, and from what we've figured out these douchewads have got eyes everywhere and as high up as it goes – it might be safer for you to come with us at this point."

Claire stifles an outraged _Are you kidding me?!_ to say, "… Is this an order or a request?"

He looks pained. "A request."

She turns her eyes down towards the pavement, studying the numerous faded oil stains beneath the equally stained soles of her Keds. "Okay," she says, "but no pulling me out. This time I make all my own choices."

"Okay," he agrees, surprising her. "Okay."

And then they see Sam in the distance.

. . .

Given that they have known him their entire lives, it is seldom that Bobby ever does anything to surprise the Winchester brothers. However, this morning is different. Typically, there would be a _What the hell've you idjits managed to get yourselves into now_, or a _I'm gettin' way too old to still be cleanin' up your goddamn messes_, but this time they receive a contradictory, "I'm glad you guys're finally here."

Claire is unfazed and pushes through the threshold as though she's entering her own home, but Sam and Dean exchange a nonplussed glance.

"What's up?" Dean asks as Claire throws herself onto the sofa, stretching out lazily like a contented feline.

Sam raises his eyebrows at her, but Bobby seems not to notice. "There's something weird goin' on in New Jersey," he prefaces.

"Again?" questions Dean.

"Again," he confirms. "And get this – people are callin' the Jersey Devil."

"_Again_?" Claire parrots.

"Again. And here's the kicker – yesterday I caught a couple o' mooks snoopin' around the scrap yard."

"Leviathans?" Sam asks anxiously.

"I dunno, but I'm gonna go with yes."

"So what, you've been compromised?" Dean demands, his tone identical to his brother's.

"Seems like."

"_Fuck_," he curses under his breath.

"Yeah. We're gonna have to go off the grid."

"I thought we already _were _off the grid."

"I'm talking deep. No more motels, no more anythin' that could possibly leave a paper-trail." Slowly, he pivots to the right to look at Claire. "And _you_, kiddo…"

"She's coming with us," Dean interjects.

Bobby's scruffy brows disappear beneath the brim of his baseball cap. "She is?"

"I am."

He still seems vaguely perplexed, but after a moment scratches at the back of his neck and says, "Well, I guess that solves that problem. Anyway, we gotta get out of here stat – if they're watchin' me and I'm still alive, they were probably waiting to see if you'd show up here."

"You're right," says Sam. "We need to pack up and _go_."

"Grab the survival kit," Bobby instructs. "We've gotta go native on this one."

"Native?" she asks in trepidation.

"Camping, sweetheart," he elaborates gruffly.

She wrinkles her nose, none too pleased by this, but elects not to say anything. It's not the camping that bothers her – it's the fact that she hasn't gone camping since she was a child, when she used to go every year with her family.

"Yeah, yeah, princess, time to roll your sleeves up," he grumbles.

Claire glares, but her features soon break into a smile. In these past many months, she has come to think of Bobby as the grouchy uncle she never she wanted. She at first found his constant condescension intimidating, but then, like everyone else, was charmed by it.

It's easy to see in the way he interacts with the Winchester boys that there is something instinctively paternal about Bobby. It's not that he's especially kind or warm or friendly – quite the opposite, in fact. But he has a way of making people feel as though they've known him for all their lives, even if – as it is in Claire's case – they haven't.

In reality, Bobby is nothing like Claire's own father. Patrick Shurley, as she remembers him from her childhood, was a vital, strapping man with salt-and-pepper hair and piercing blue eyes that attested to his Black Irish heritage. After the death of his sons, his hair turned steel-gray and thinned, and his vitality turned to acrimony.

Claire's mother, on the other end of the spectrum, was a gentle, empathetic woman, and the genetic source of Claire and Charlie's fire-red hair. Her mild disposition made her a perfect foil to her hardheaded spouse, and after she coaxed him through vivid nightmares about a sweating jungle halfway around the world, she, young and naïve, erroneously believed they had already weathered the most turbulent stage of their relationship.

After the death of her sons, she retreated into her vast empathy and became nearly catatonic. She lost the ability to temper her husband and his deranged despair came to rule an empty household; Claire couldn't stand to live under it and no one seemed to notice.

These two bestowed upon their daughter very diverse gifts. From her father she received her energy and tenacity, and from her mother she learned compassion. And in demonstrating the complete and utter perversion of these gifts, her parents gave her one more – an ominous premonition urging her to avoid their fate at all costs.

Now, Claire feels just as orphaned as any of her compatriots. She wasn't left with bodies, but she was left with husks. Still, seeing Bobby, present despite it all, despite stabbing his own wife to death, she realizes that lives don't have to end in pairs.

. . .

They spend their first night in New Jersey in an isolated, derelict home near the border of the woods. The plaster is peeling off the walls, exposing beams and half-chewed insulation, and the wooden floorboards are moldering beneath their feet. There's no electricity and late-February on the East Coast is still winter. They've endured colder temperatures, but freezing to death is a distinct possibility without the proper precautions.

Still, this is the first time in a long time the boys have stayed anywhere with four walls and a roof (albeit a collapsing one). It is also the first time in a far longer time that Dean and Claire have had more than a fifteen minutes to themselves.

They sequester themselves off from Sam and Bobby, treading carefully through the imploding house to find a spot that's out of earshot so they can at least maintain the illusion of being alone. They've rigged the lights to work but now it's time to try to get some shuteye, so they turn them off. The pair finds a shadowy campground near the front door and diametrically opposite where the others are stationed.

Bobby and Sam surely have their suspicions about why Claire and Dean are slinking off in the middle of the night, but to draw attention to it would be to cheapen it. Maybe they'll get teased mercilessly in the morning, but now, shrouded in the surreal haze of darkness, cold, and exhaustion, no one utters a word.

They drop their downy sleeping bags soundlessly to the floor and stand facing one another, so close that the misty swirls of their breath amalgamate into one warm, humid cloud in the space between them.

Claire's teeth are chattering and Dean pulls her against him, wrapping his coat around the both of them. She has a winter jacket of her own, but she's the type of person who can never seem to find a comfortable temperature – she is either shivering violently or burning up.

For a while they don't move; her arms are wrapped around his waist, warmed by the heavy fabric of his coat, and her ear is pressed over his heart. She can hear this core of heat pump warm blood through his veins – she can almost feel it, as her own body temperature starts to climb.

"Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we just quit," Dean murmurs into her silky hair. "If someone else would take over, or if it would all just… end."

Claire shifts her cheek against the soft cotton of his shirt and grips him a degree tighter. "Do you think it ever will end?" she asks, voice low and uncharacteristically raspy.

"I think it would have already if we hadn't done anything."

"No, I mean do you think you'll ever be able to stop?"

Dean hesitates, but he doesn't know why. "No," he says eventually. "Whenever you think it's over, there's always one more thing." The words curl into a vapor as they pass his lips, before dissipating into the air with a certain finality.

She nods against him in grim comprehension. That's okay, she thinks. To be with him, even like this, is good enough for her.

"But sometimes," he goes on, "I think maybe we should just stop anyway. If everyone we care about dies in the process, what's the point?"

"You're talking about Castiel?"

"Not just Cas. Look at us, Claire. We're being hunted. We're living like fugitives – we _are_ fugitives. At what point does it become too much? We've fought uphill battles before and sometimes it's felt like all the universe was conspiring against us, but that stuff with Heaven and Hell – that was never on the home-front like this is. Lucifer and Michael – they never took that away from us. After killing the Horsemen, we could rest up for the next battle in a warm bed. These Leviathans – they're fighting us on our own turf, they're smoking us out. They're fighting us like humans."

Claire inclines her head to examine his shaded features. The shadow of his brow obscures his eyes, but their glassy quality makes them sparkle in the moonlight like onyx, almost like a demon's eyes. She sees the sweeping brush of his lashes moving with these darkened eyes as he searches her face.

"But you always manage to make it through," she says. "I don't think this time will be any different."

Their noses touch before their lips do, and when they kiss it is gingerly and unhurriedly. Dean's mouth is like a beacon of heat in the frigid air, and they sway a little bit where they stand, the cold making their limbs feel sluggish and heavy. They reacquaint themselves with the taste and feeling of one another, and when they break apart he traces his lips over her hairline, cheekbones, and the corner of her mouth, caressing her jaw with the callused pads of his thumbs. It is as though he is recording the blueprint of her features so he will never forget it.

And then, nestled inside one sleeping bag on the decaying floor and taxed by stress and single-digit temperatures, they don't do anything other than sleep.

. . .

"There's no way this thing's the Jersey Devil," Claire tells Bobby as they're on their way to meet Sam and Dean, who are currently out interrogating the chief park ranger.

"Maybe you two didn't get all of 'em," he reasons, pulling into the parking lot of Big Gerson's.

"But that was a few miles away from here, anyway, and close to two years ago. Even if there were more, how did they get here? And why didn't they leave a trail of bodies along the way? Dean said there wasn't a high enough body-count for there to be more than two."

"Well, maybe you shot mommy and daddy and the little'uns are all grown up now."

Claire bites her lip. "Maybe."

"We saw the body – the MO's the same. It's worth lookin' into, at least."

Upon seeing them walk into the restaurant, the Winchester brothers abandon their booth.

"So?" Dean asks.

"Looks like it could be the same sort of thing we saw before," Claire replies.

"I thought you said you got all of them," says Sam, turning towards Dean accusatorily.

"Hey, I thought we did," he defends. "There were only half-a-dozen bodies or so – that ain't the work of a flock of those motherfuckers, let me tell you…"

"Bobby thinks maybe we killed the parents and now the babies migrated and grew up," she adds dryly. Bobby nods to corroborate her claim.

"Huh. Well, I guess we'll find out. Lunch?" says Dean, totally unperturbed by the notion that he might have orphaned a litter of monsters.

"I'm starvin'," Bobby agrees.

Dean flags down a waiter, who, to everyone's shock and amusement, immediately begins insulting him. The look on Dean's face is priceless, like he can't even register the words that are coming out of the other man's mouth. In his horrified astonishment, he fails miserably in devising some sort of appropriate comeback to the flair-encrusted waiter.

Claire covers her mouth to conceal her laughter, Bobby's mouth is hanging open, and Sam nudges him. "That didn't really make sense, what you said about the hostess," he snickers.

Dean, completely at a loss, flounders and breathes, "What the _hell_ was that?"

"I sure hope we don't get Brandon's section," Bobby deadpans, brows knitted in befuddlement.

Alas, though, they do.

"Soup n' salad combo goes to Big Bird," he says through smacking gum, setting a plate in front of Sam. "TDK slammer to Ken Doll," he says to Dean, "Caesar salad and a side of fries to the Little Mermaid," he says to Claire, "and heart smart for Creepy Uncle," he says to a flabbergasted Bobby.

"_What_ is your problem?" Dean demands.

"You are my problem!" Brandon explodes, storming away.

Dean is left more confused than angry in his wake.

"There goes his eighteen percent," Sam quips with a smirk, enjoying the display far more than he should.

"What in the holy hell is going on in this town…" Bobby grunts, mixing up his salad.

"Anyway," Dean starts, "I don't think Ranger Rick believes in the Jersey Devil."

"Oh," Sam interrupts, waving his hand animatedly, "by the way, did he seem a little, uh, _stoned_ to you?" Perhaps for the first time, Sam seems to be handling this far less maturely than Dean.

"Oh," his brother echoes, golden eyebrows raised. "_Range Rick_? Definitely growin' his own in the back forty and smoking all the profits." He takes a huge bite of his sandwich.

"He did seem to think that _something_ was eating these people, though," Sam adds.

"Whatever it is, it's killing a lot like the Jersey Devil," Claire says.

"Yeah, whatever it is we gotta go after it," Bobby concurs.

"Man, that is a _good_ sandwich," Dean exclaims suddenly.

"What did you get?" Claire asks.

He holds up the specials card on the table. "New Pepper-jack Turducken Slammer, limited time only," he says through a mouthful.

"Can I try?"

He hands her the gargantuan sandwich and she takes a significantly smaller bite than he did. "That is actually pretty good," she judges.

"Innit?"

"Bunch o' birds shoved up inside each other," Bobby notices, shaking his head. "You shouldn't play God like that."

"Hey, don't look at me sideways from that geezer Chinese chicken salad, okay? This is awesome. It's like the perfect storm of your top three edible birds."

Claire and Sam stare at each other with parallel expressions of combined disgust, amusement, and bewilderment.

Sam shakes his head briefly. "Well, anyway, looks like we're goin' out in the woods tonight."

. . .

They arrive at their shoddy HQ with something out a Lord of the Rings movie. Sam and Dean drop it onto the splintering dining table; the sickening thud of rotting flesh hitting wood fills the room.

"Are we sure it's dead?" Claire questions, clearly fearful and put-off.

Dean slaps its ankle cockily. "He's dead alright."

"This is _not_ what we killed before," she adds.

"Yeah, well, what the hell is it?" Bobby says. "Lookit how skinny he is – built like a supermodel, and strong as an ox."

"But it only took one bullet to bring him down," Sam interjects.

"And not even a silver bullet – just a _bullet_ bullet," Dean piles on.

As if on cue, the heinous creature springs to life with an unearthly hiss. Its eyes are white and bulging like hard-boiled eggs and its skin – or at least the parts that aren't smeared with Ranger Rick's blood – has a sickly, greenish pallor.

Claire screams, her heart jumping up to her throat, and Sam and Dean immediately empty a round of bullets into the thing's abdomen.

When it falls back down on the table, the brothers exhale and Bobby, impossibly calm, says, "The first one must've just stunned it."

They check the monster for an ID and, to their great surprise, find that he had once been a 234 lb man. All the while Dean is acting strangely.

"Are you feelin' okay?" Bobby questions after he makes a comment about the guy's wallet.

"Yeah I feel great," he answers, sounding unusually sincere.

Claire narrows her eyes. "Babe, you're acting weird."

"Nah, I'm fine. I'm good." He has no reaction to the pet name, which is even more odd. He pats his stomach and continues, "Actually, now that you mention it, I'm kinda hungry."

Sam, meanwhile, has been poking at the man's body. "Guys," he says, holding a stick caked in purplish goo, "I think we'd better look into _this_."

While Sam and Bobby are performing an autopsy, Dean pours himself a glass of whiskey and says, "Seriously, none of you are hungry?"

The other two, on the verge of vomiting, turn to stare at him incredulously. "There's a fucking _cat's head_ in here, Dean!" Sam states.

Claire, sickened and desperate to get out of this back-alley operating room, offers, "I'll take him to get something to eat and figure out what the hell's wrong with him."

"Okay," the others agree, and Dean mutters, "I'm fine, Jesus…," following her out the door nevertheless.

At Big Gerson's, Dean does not say a word other than to order another Turducken sandwich. He chows down on the thing, flour dusting his upper lip.

Midway through his repulsive feasting, Claire tries to get his attention. "Dean? Hello? Don't you have anything to say about that thing we just found?"

"Eh, you know, I'm not worried about it."

"_What_?"

He goes to take another chomp, but Claire rips the sandwich out of his hand. "Focus," she orders.

"Yeah I mean, I couldn't give two shakes of a rat's ass," he says, reaching out to steal his meal back. "Is… is that right? Does a rat shake their ass or is that somethin' else?"

Dean's eyelids are drooping and she realizes something suddenly – he's acting drugged. "Dean, stop," she says, slapping the sandwich out of his hand. "Look at you. You're stoned." Her gaze then whirls around the restaurant to see that everyone around them has the same absent, glazed look in their eye. Without waiting for a response, she grabs his wrist and pulls him up from the table, towards the door. He drags the sandwich along with him, plate and all, but she takes it from him like a mother snatching a toy from a disobedient toddler.

* * *

**A/N: I hope you all liked it! Please let me know what you think :)**


	6. Let It Be

**A/N: Thank you so much to Nemu-Chan and Tenderloins for reviewing! I appreciate the feedback more than I can even say! I hope everyone likes this chapter, and I apologize in advance for **MAJOR SEASON 7 SPOILERS****

**Song: Let It Be by The Beatles**

* * *

**CHAPTER 6**

**Let It Be**

When the Turducken sandwich degenerates to the very same purplish-gray goo they found in that creature's stomach, everyone is concerned – even Dean.

"That… That's in me?"

In an ill-advised attempt to make his brother feel better, Sam points out, "Only half of it."

Dean leans back in his seat on the countertop, listing almost drunkenly to one side. It seems like part of his brain is fighting to snap out of whatever drug-induced state of mind he is wrapped up in.

"Is he gonna be okay?!" Claire demands.

"I dunno," Bobby murmurs. "How ya feelin'?"

"If I wasn't so chilled-out right now, I would puke," he tells them, somehow managing to sound distressed and relaxed at the same time.

"At least 'e knows what's goin' on…"

"Everyone in the restaurant was like this," she says, "Everyone was eating that stupid sandwich."

"Toldja that shit ain't natural…"

"We need to go to where they make this meat," Sam says, and so they do.

Dean is dead asleep in Claire's lap as they stake out the factory.

"Is this normal?" she asks, fussing with his hair. "Should we be worried he's gonna turn into one of those _things_?"

"Nah, I think now he's just sleepin' it off," Bobby answers. "He'll be fine."

"I tried that sandwich too – how come it didn't affect me?" she asks.

"You probably didn't eat enough of it to make a difference," Sam replies smartly.

"Unless o' course you're feeling just as mellow as Shaggy there," Bobby drawls.

"No, I'm plenty freaked out."

"I brought coffee, just in case," says Sam, handing her a stainless-steel thermostat.

"Thanks."

"Make 'im drink that too when he wakes up," Bobby instructs.

It's not long before he holds the binoculars back up to his face and a hush falls throughout the van. The only sound cutting through the air is Dean's snoring.

After a moment, Sam starts, "Claire?"

"Yeah?"

"Has… has Dean seemed _off_ to you? Before this, I mean."

"In what way?"

"I dunno. Dean's always been a bit… easily upset. But after what happened with Cas and then… and then _me_, I worry about him. He hasn't… he hasn't said anything to you, has he?"

"No," she fibs. "Nothing alarming, anyway. I think… I think he'll be all right. He just needs to get through this rough patch. Castiel was… Cas was like a brother to him – to have him betray him, and then die… It was a lot for him. It's hard to see the light when you're in the darkest part of the tunnel, you know?"

"Yeah… Yeah, maybe you're right. But doesn't it sometimes seem like he's just… going through the motions?"

"I think it's normal to want to stop moving when something so horrible happens. Dean's strong – he's still moving. He's just dragging his feet."

"Oh, boo-hoo," Bobby snaps abruptly. "I need y'all to get your heads in the friggen game over here. Ya think I wanted to spend my best years leading a brood of temperamental twenty-somethings against an army of immortal cannibals? Hell naw. I should be in a condo in Florida right now. But we all got our crosses to bear."

And with this, Sam and Claire shut up.

. . .

When the Leviathans capture Bobby, Dean seriously considers telling Claire to wait in the car, where it's safe. But then he remembers his promise – he'll be damned if he doesn't honor something so important to her. So, to his tremendous chagrin, she sneaks into the factory along with them.

"You take this end, and you point it right at those bastards' faces," he orders, handing her a large canister of bathroom-cleaner. "It won't kill 'em, but it'll buy us time. We get in, we get Bobby, we get out – that's it."

"Okay."

"And stick with one of us," Sam chimes in. "Do _not_ let them corner you."

"Okay."

"Yeah, I want you in my line of sight at all times, understand?" Dean continues, sounding strangely soldier-like. At least they can be sure he's shaken off that sandwich's influence.

"_Okay_."

"Alright. Let's go."

Once inside, they immediately douse the two Leviathans in the storage room, coming at them from all angles. The high stakes of the mission make it impossible to appreciate how ridiculous they look attacking the creatures with cleaning supplies. It's amazing how something so simple could be so damaging to these cockroaches.

Soon, though, Dick Roman joins the skirmish. They recognize him from television, but in person his tailored suit and Cheshire grin gives less of a psychotic Mitt Romney and more of a Patrick Bateman sort of impression.

"You must be that little treasure they've kept buried all this time," he says upon seeing her. "We've heard so much about you, _Claire_. Words don't do you justice – you look simply delectable."

She can see Sam and Dean in her periphery but they, like her, have run out of washer fluid.

All of a sudden, gunshots ring out and Dick absorbs the impact of three bullets.

"Hey," he chides, turning around to address his attacker, "that's mine."

Bobby is there, holding a smoking handgun. While Dick is distracted, Dean dumps the remnants of his washer fluid onto his face, causing it to dissolve, momentarily, into a flesh-colored smoke.

"Ouch," he hisses, still leering. "Would you stop it with that stuff?"

Dick begins to stride towards Bobby, giving them all the chance they need to run. It's not until the three of them make it to the van that they realize their friend is still inside.

"Why didn't he follow us out?!" Claire demands from the backseat.

"Dammit, Bobby!" Sam's tone contains a similar muddle of exasperation and anxiousness.

Dean keeps his foot hovering above the gas pedal, ready to deck it when the need arises, and his death-grip on the wheel is causing his fingernails to slice into his palms. The door to the factory swings open, and Bobby appears.

"C'mon c'mon c'mon," Dean chants.

Claire slides the car door open, waiting for him, when Dick Roman also emerges from the building, pistol in hand.

"Run, Bobby!" Sam shouts.

There's a gunshot, but by this time Bobby is already inside the van. Claire closes the door behind them and Dean takes off like a bat out of hell, tires skidding on the asphalt as Dick shoots a couple more bullets at them, ever-smiling.

"Son of a bitch!" Dean exclaims, the tension finally broken. "Thank god you got in – he almost took your friggen head off."

"Guys," Claire whispers, staring at her now-red palms. For a moment, she thinks maybe that stray bullet hit her. When the brothers don't reply, she says, more loudly, "Guys!"

"What?" Dean asks in apparent irritation. He and Sam swivel around to see what the matter is.

She shows them her hands. "There's… there's blood."

. . .

In the hospital, the world doesn't seem real anymore. Claire, garnished with the crimson evidence of some new tragedy, doubts that her feet are connected to her ankles, that her hands are connected to her wrists, just as she doubts that what is happening is _truly_ happening.

She has been surrounded by death, but she has never seen anyone die before.

What she can't know and what Dean and Sam most certainly can is that it's a sensation you never get used to. That feeling of your stomach whirling, spiraling down through the hollow of your body, and all at the same time the ground crumbling beneath your feet, your heart shoved up in your esophagus because of it, burning, sinking, _falling – _it's indescribable. At first your mind is numb because the adrenaline won't let it process what's happening, some biological self-defense mechanism intervening. You want to think but you can't, and when you finally can you wish you couldn't.

She loved Bobby, but not like Sam and Dean did.

Right now, in this fog of unreality, Sam seems like the stable one. He presses the heel of his palm, presses that scar, that benchmark, to stave off some sort of impending mental collapse. He presses it to remain grounded. Just like Dean said, this pain is different – real. He is quiet, accepting.

Dean is unrecognizable.

He does not cry, he does not search for an out – he gets angry. There is a simmering rage lying shallowly beneath the surface, ready to incinerate anyone who provokes him. He is seething, angry that this has happened, angry that he is helpless _yet again_, and angry that Bobby's life is dangling in the balance. There's something to be said for certainty, for closure. Now, the hope is what infuriates him.

Claire is a wreck, because when does getting shot in the head never _not_ end in death? She sobs and sobs and sobs, and it is not Dean who soothes her, but Sam, because he too knows what it means to have a bullet pierce your brain. It's only Dean who refuses to see it, who can't stop himself from grasping that taunting line of hope and clinging to it for dear life. He gets reeled up, caught in the trap. And in the end, this is why he always feels more pain than everyone else.

Sam lets Claire's tears stain his tawny coat under the callous fluorescent lights and amidst the stench of chemicals and death. Dean is pacing, shouting, itching to escape his own skin. He disappears and returns to them bleeding, and no one is surprised.

"Stop crying," he growls at Claire, "he's going to be fine." His eyes are red-rimmed and seem unnaturally green, complementary colors working in harmony.

Sam doesn't say anything. He just stares at him, gives him that look, that pitying, disappointed, and tearful look that reminds him _he_ is the older brother and _he's_ the one who has to keep it together. He feels instantly remorseful, and this in itself only enrages him further. But then, on the other hand, he sees his brother cradling his… whatever Claire is to him, her engulfed in his arms, holding onto him, and he thinks maybe this should make him feel something too, but it doesn't.

Dean would have followed his father to the grave out of filial obedience; he would have followed Bobby because he loved him. His dad taught him how to fight and how hard life is, but Bobby taught him everything else. It wasn't his dad who played catch with him, who gave him advice about Lisa Marcelli in the sixth grade, or who watched the entirety of TNT's Rambo marathon with him that one time. And to lose both these people – his real father and his voluntary father – is too much. He just wants to lie down and die, to let this overwhelming anger seep out of his bones so he doesn't have to manage it anymore. He wants out.

The closest he can get is the parking lot.

When Dick Roman pulls up outside the hospital, he raves at him like a lunatic, not caring who sees. It's oddly cathartic, in a way, to allow all the world to glimpse the depths of his despair just this once. It's freeing, letting himself unravel, letting his pretense of composure liquefy. His entire life he's been masking his emotions, but now they're on display for the public to see, like some sort of twisted circus-act.

At one point he comes back inside and talks to Sam in private, which ends with both brothers feeling more upset than before, each in their own way. Dean storms outside again, most likely seeking out a fight, and Sam sits back down beside Claire, letting her fall onto him because he needs her as much as she needs him. He needs _someone_.

"_Whaddyou wanna do? You wanna hug, and say we made it through it when dad died?" Dean sneers, mocking him. "We've been through enough."_

But that's exactly what Sam wants – he wants his big brother, he wants the one who's been more of a father to him than any of their fathers. He wants that brave twelve-year-old boy who comforted him when he cried about the monsters, cried about the _truth_ when John was, as always, somewhere in the wind. But, for the first time ever, that boy has abandoned him. He gave him a second look before he left, but he _still_ _left_.

. . .

Later, when they loom over his hospital bed, Sam is the same and Dean and Claire are a bit more sedated. It seems, fleetingly, that that hope Dean latched onto wasn't as transitory as it seemed.

Everyone knows they should say something before they take him in for surgery because it might be the last time they see him breathing, and Sam is the one who steps up to the plate because he knows Dean hates to articulate his feelings. Not that he is such a wordsmith. But he can handle things like this better than his brother can. He grabs Bobby's limp hand in his and murmurs, "Bobby, um, hey. Just… thanks. For everything."

Dean swallows heavily, letting Claire lean against him, and all at once Bobby's hand comes to life, blindly searching out Sam's. And then, just as shakily, Bobby's eyes crack open.

"Whoa whoa whoa, stop!" Sam exclaims. "His eyes are open."

"Bobby?" Dean calls out.

Stunned, they smile unsteadily and hover over him. He rips off his oxygen mask, gasping in breaths that sound like a labored attempt at speech. Sam grips his hand tightly.

"D-d-don't talk, don't talk!" says Dean. "A pen…" Claire quickly hands him the clipboard from the end of the bed.

On Sam's palm, Bobby jots down a sequence of numbers, but when he's done his mouth still struggles desperately to form words. After much effort he eventually manages, "Idjits," and, for the shortest moment, they all smile.

Then his head, crown of bloodstained gauze and all, falls back against the pillow; in the deafening silence, they hear his monitor flat-line. The sound is high-pitched and strident, like an alarm signaling an air raid. _Find a bomb shelter, the world is ending, the sky is falling, you're under attack._

Is it just him, Sam wonders, or can they all hear it?

They can all hear it. As the doctors wrench them away, this sound is the sole thing filling their ears, clogging them up like they're underwater. Their hearts beat to it, which is to say they stop beating altogether. They float stagnantly in their chests, waiting for something that will never come.

"_No_," Claire chokes and the boys yell, and then everything is moving around them but they're standing still.

. . .

_I want to go home, I want to go home_.

It's an odd thing to want to go home when you don't have one, Claire discovers.

"I'm not cut out for this," she tells them. "I know it makes you angry, but it only makes me sad," and she fears maybe she is more like her mother than she ever knew.

No one tries to convince her to stay. Of course she wants to get out – who wouldn't? Lucifer is everywhere and nowhere, Bobby has been dead for two full days, Dean isn't really Dean, and through it all no one has even noticed that she's not getting visions anymore.

Where can she fit into this distorted reflection of what once was? She doesn't know. She needs to figure it out. Maybe she never will.

The closest thing she has to a home now is that lonesome cabin in South Dakota, but they can't take her there, not when the Leviathans were already able to track down Bobby's house. So they drop her off with Sheriff Mills because they can't think of anyone else once she refuses to return to her parents but doesn't want to be alone – and they agree, none of them should be alone. They need each other to find themselves again, to remember who they are.

But she wants to leave, so they oblige her. It's almost funny – after all that fighting to go with them, she's turning around with her tail between her legs. It's almost funny, but really it's not funny at all.

The hunting, the piecing together clues, the saving people – she can do that. But the death… Seeing Bobby die meant more than just _seeing Bobby die, _though that alone might have been enough.

With her brothers, she got phone calls, she got coffins, she got funerals, and it was all very tidy and organized. But now that she has seen someone die, those memories are, that _pain_, is skewed through a different lens. Now she can only _imagine_. All that blood. Blood everywhere, staining her hands, staining her shirt, she can't get it off.

Both Ryan and Charlie had closed caskets. There wasn't much left of Ryan, and suicide is a sin in the Catholic Church so everyone pretended Charlie's death was an accident. If you saw the wound you would know it wasn't, so they kept him hidden, lying to everyone and lying to themselves, aware of their own transparency.

No, she never saw her brothers again after she saw them for what was, then unknowingly, the last time. But now her brain runs wild. What would they have said to her, if they could have said something? Were they scared? What did it look like to see the light leave their eyes, what was that one moment – that air raid alarm moment – like?

Before Bobby, she hadn't even known what questions to ask.

But like Bobby said, _We all got our crosses to bear. _Dean is self-immolating, his anger consuming him; he hardly speaks, and when he does it is only ever to say something hurtful. And Sam won't stop touching his palm.

Tears race down Dean's cheeks as he drives yet another random car to Sioux Falls, the only thing moving on his granite face. Claire is sleeping in the back because all she wants to do nowadays is sleep, and Sam is watching the clouds pass in a polluted stream of gray. It looks like it might rain, but it isn't actually raining yet. He wrings his hands, trying to compartmentalize the singsong _Why so glum, Sammy?_ whispered in his ear.

Dean scrubs at his face before he exits the car, knowing he's going to have to talk to Jody Mills. When they arrive at her doorstep, as expected, she ensnares him in a watery embrace. Her own sorrow makes her oblivious to his unmovable expression.

"I'm so sorry," she tells him, moving down the line to hug Sam. "I'm so sorry."

_It's what you say when you can't think of anything else_, he remembers thinking once_._

"Thanks," Sam mumbles, still-polite in light of it all.

Dean is the opposite, always his inverted image in the mirror when it comes to withstanding pain. He has lost any semblance of decorum, if he even had one to begin with. His raw misery has turned him into a bare-bones human, equipped with mental cognizance but none of the frills.

When it comes time to say goodbye to Claire, his eyes are far-away and unfocused. "I guess this is it," he says coolly, faintly aware that he has to say _something_. "At least for now." The phantom of a smile pulls at his lips, forced.

She doesn't know how to interact with him – he has morphed into a stranger. She hugs him but he just stands there. "Goodbye," she says, and he turns away, impervious to Sam's disbelieving stare.

Dean knows he should be moved by it, but he only feels empty.

* * *

**A/N: So sorry for the super depressing factor of this one. I hope you don't mind too much, and I hope I conveyed Claire's reason for leaving adequately. I really don't mean it as a cop-out - it will be further explained in the upcoming chapters. Please let me know what you think, and thanks for reading :)**


	7. Lithium: Part 1

**A/N: Thank you so much to Tenderloins, ImpalaLove, and Nemu-Chan for reviewing the last chapter! I'm sorry it was so hard to read - I was an absolute mess during that part in the series :'( But anyway, I hope you guys can forgive me and that you'll like this chapter (it's not exactly happier, but it's different).**

**Song: Lithium by Nirvana**

* * *

**CHAPTER 7**

**Lithium: Part 1**

"This is mania, Dean."

"No," his brother snaps. "No. This is called doing what needs to be done."

"We need a break from Dick Roman. We're running in circles. It's not healthy."

"A _break_?"

"You know what I mean. There are people out there who need saving. When new information arises, we'll get back to the Leviathan thing, but until then, there's no sense in driving yourself crazy over it. You're not eating, you're living on a diet of whiskey and caffeine, and you're not sleeping. You're listening to Nirvana loudly and at all hours, on a loop. You don't need to be a psychologist to know that this is _mania_, Dean. You keep listening to that stuff like you are and you may just turn into Kurt Cobain."

There's a pause, during which time Dean paws at his bloodshot eyes.

"I'm low, Sam, but I'm not that low."

"I'm not so sure."

"Since when am _I_ the basket case?"

Dean's shoving his hand into an open wound, just like before. He does this as a deflection, he knows, but it still stings. Sam did put that gun to his own head, after all, and he hasn't forgotten how the warm metal seared a perfect circle into his jaw.

"You're shutting me out. You're shutting _everyone_ out. You think it can protect you, but it can't."

"Look, Sam. I know myself. I know that Dick Roman's blood is the only thing that's gonna cleanse me of this. And the sooner I can do that, the better."

"But you're gonna lose yourself before you do that happens! I loved Bobby too, Dean, I loved Cas _too_. But they're gone, and now we only have each other, and we have to remember that they wouldn't want us to jump off the deep end after them."

"I know, Sammy. I know. Remember when I came back from Hell? When I said I wished I couldn't feel a damn thing? Well, I finally figured out how to shut it off. Bury it in purpose. This is my way of dealing, and I'm sorry if you don't like it, but it's the only way I'm gonna make it through."

"Fine," he mutters. "But you're scaring me."

. . .

Jody Mills is a resilient, caring woman who, after the loss of her son, very clearly wishes to be a mother to someone. And, as fate would have it, she is saddled with a girl who is in dire need of mothering.

The first three days, Claire just sleeps. Sheriff Mills often finds her shivering, cold but not-cold, delirious. She drapes a blanket over her and dabs at her forehead, not quite sure what's wrong with her. As an officer of the law, she has her suspicions – she's seen things, seen men folded in on themselves in their cells, writhing on the ground –, but she can't fathom that Claire is of the same ilk, that Bobby's boys would entertain such a thing.

So she delivers her three meals a day, never deterred by the fact she doesn't so much as touch any of them, and has long-since stop trying to get her to speak. She has faith that she will tell her everything when she is ready.

In the meantime, she stockpiles Bobby's belongings in the basement.

. . .

At first Claire thought she was just depressed, but then some physical illness manifested itself. Not that depression isn't physical – it is, she _knows_ it is (and, she thinks, those pills would be great right about now). But, as she also knows, it is treated as a mental condition, and this suffering is not confined to her mind.

The inside of her body is like a cast filled with liquid metal, but the outside world is freezing.

Where the inside and outside meet, on her skin, there is a great confusion, a clashing of titanic elements. She is sucked into a vortex of too-hot and too-cold, shaking and sweating all at the same time.

She is sure she has a fever. It's what the body does to fight off infection. Raise the temperature to exterminate the threat. She just doesn't know what the threat is.

The lava in her head leaves her unable to think properly. She used to get lost in that head, lost in those words, all those words.

There are no words anymore, just images and sounds. She has flashes of consciousness and she can't tell if they're real or dreams or memories because they don't last long enough.

In one flash she's somewhere musty and there's a noise in the background that sounds like people talking, but their speech is hollow. She hears a voice – Dean – say, "There's no way in hell I'm watching a friggen chick-flick," and then she hears her own voice say, "But _please_? This one's my favorite!" A smile, a shimmer of white. "Only for you."

And in another flash she hears laughter. "Did I ever tell you about the time I caught Dean putting concealer on in high school? He said it fell out of some chick's pockets in the back of the Impala – a total lie. Don't tell him I told you – he made me swear never to tell anyone," and in the distance someone yelling, "I'm gonna kill you, you little bitch!" "I'd like to see you try, jerk!" "Knock it off, ya idjits!"

They take her further back: a red-haired child running through a field with a kite streaming behind him. "C'mon, Claire, you have to run to make it fly!" And someone shouting, "Come back home, guys, it's almost time for dinner!" Giggling, somewhere in the back of the car, finding gum stuck in her ponytail. A dark-haired boy, taller than her, betting he can shoot more bull's-eyes and proving himself right.

She wonders why she's seeing these things.

Like everything, though, it eventually stops, like a pot off boiling water taken off of the fire. And, for the first time in a long time, all that's left is silence.

. . .

Dean's drinking has become insurmountable. He totes around Bobby's battered flask, sucking down liquor like it's water. He's not even sure if it helps or not; all he knows is that when he wakes up aching in the morning, he doesn't remember what he thought about the night before.

Years ago, if pressed, Sam might have admitted his brother had something of a problem – now, he would openly declare it.

They're on a case in Seattle, Washington. Dean doesn't have a fucking clue how Sam's doing because half the time he's blind-drunk and the other half he's too entrenched in his own issues to notice. But still that _Look out for your little brother, boy_ is stitched into his soul, so he follows his lead when it comes to where they travel. This is the best he can do in the way of protection – offer compliance.

His brother talks at him and the words go by, unregistered. He has always been a bit one-track-minded, but now that train is speeding down that track like a bullet, everything else ricocheting off it and shattering on impact. Maybe Sam will stop trying at some point, maybe he'll give up on him – but that has yet to happen. He tells him about murders, tells him about killers that must be stopped, about lives that must be saved. And all Dean hears is the wind rushing in his ears.

Now, you have to understand this part, because it's important – when Dean goes to that bar, he only has the intention of soaking his liver in another 750 mL of alcohol.

Maybe a change of scenery will be good for me, he thinks, maybe I can forget who I am.

So he dresses like someone else and goes somewhere he would never go: The Cobalt Room. As the name implies, the place is half-bar half-club, and all the surfaces are glowing blue. The décor is sleek and modern – clinical and sterile. Just standing in the threshold, electronic music leaching through his bones and onto the sidewalk behind him, he feels less like himself than he has in years. The alien sensation of the bass pounding in the top of his chest is a bit imposing, but at least it makes him feel something.

This is a place for the road not taken – a place for free and thriving young professionals, new to the workforce and new to the world. They reminisce about college and talk about dividends, all the while spending far too much money on drinks that are far too neon.

This is not a place for people like him. But camouflage him in a suit and comb his hair and voilà, he fits in better than those who actually belong. It's just like being an FBI agent or a reporter or a health inspector – it's all about poise. The substance is secondary.

A woman approaches him right away and he tells her a story about an investment banker. He's flattered when she thinks he's talking about himself – it almost makes him believe he could have been that person, under different circumstances, in a parallel universe, one where he gives a shit about any of this. Someone smarter than he is once said disguise is always a self-portrait*, but Dean never thought much about that.

"Do you want to get out of here?" asks Lucy or Lila or Lydia or Libby, and he doesn't know what he says but the next thing he knows he's a cab, a _cab_, and she's kissing him. Dean doesn't know what else to do but kiss back. It's just instinct, muscle memory.

It's not until they're inside her apartment and she's unbuttoning his shirt and sinking to her knees that something deep in his brain screeches to a halt_._ And he thinks, when he can only see the top of her head, she looks a bit like...

_Claire._

_Fuck._

He pushes her away and his body screams. "W-w-whoa, stop, I – uh – wait, I can't."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" The girl with the name that begins with an L seems more enraged than offended. Her eyes are wide and black like saucers and her mouth is too big, and Dean can't help but think she is astoundingly ugly but he's sure it's his mind playing tricks on him, just like that time with the hellhounds.

"Yeah, I, uh, I gotta go." He scrambles to re-button his clothes and flee the apartment, his tie, still somewhere behind the sofa, becoming a casualty of his haste.

He walks home to walk off the nausea. This transgression has jarred him out of more than just his drunken stupor. He can feel his stomach flop, falling through his gut, through his feet, all the way down to Hell, and he thinks to himself, _What is wrong with me?_

When he returns to their hideout, Sam is awake and waiting for him.

"Where were you," he asks, and Dean wants to curl up and die.

"Out."

"Where's your tie?"

"I took it off."

"You threw it away?"

"I lost it."

"What happened to you neck?"

Dean fingers his throat, the flesh still warm and supple from someone's mouth.

And then he sees something in Sam's dark hazel eyes, something he's never seen before. It's not disappointment – he's seen that. It's disgust.

"Look, Sammy, it's not what you think…"

Sam laughs something bitter and broken. "I don't even know who you are anymore, Dean."

"It's not – I didn't – it's not what it looks like."

"I'll be damned if that's not the oldest fucking excuse in the playbook."

"I know, I know, but –"

"Save it," he cuts him off. "You don't have to explain yourself to me."

. . .

On the fourth morning, Jody finds a way to reach through the veil and pull Claire through it.

"Look who I found scratching at the door up at the cabin," she says, depositing Claire's forgotten friend at the foot of her bed. The cat, leaner than before, treads atop the sheets to sit on her chest, forcing her to acknowledge it.

"Spot…" Claire murmurs, extending her hand so it can rub its face against her.

"So you know him?"

"Him?"

"He's a boy – you didn't know that?"

"I couldn't tell," she admits sheepishly.

Sheriff Mills grins. "You never had cats before?"

"Never…" She stares into his eyes, one dark and one light, both the color of blue crystals. He stares right back, looking into her soul.

Jody's voice rouses her from this trance. "Are you feeling better?" she asks.

"Much," she replies with a weak smile.

. . .

_The road is long_

_With many a winding turn_

_That leads us to who knows where_

_Who knows when_

_But I'm strong_

_Strong enough to carry him_

_He ain't heavy, he's my brother**_

This is what Lucifer belts out. All. The. Time.

Dean makes him angry. Incessantly, lately. Really he's more indignant nowadays. _He's_ the only one with a legitimate excuse to go crazy.

But _no_, Dean's being selfish.

Why should he be taking care of him when _he's_ the one whose perception of reality is in shambles? After everything, though, he supposes he owes it to him. Just this once. Because maybe Dean needs to get this out of his system. He doesn't approve. Obviously. It confuses and repulses him. He doesn't recognize him. But that's only because Sane-Dean has let Insane-Dean take the wheel.

Insane-Sam is jealous. His muffled screams are contained within Sane-Sam's skull. _CAN'T YOU SEE THAT I NEED YOU, _he shouts, _CAN'T YOU SEE THAT SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH ME?_ But so long as Insane-Dean rules, Sane-Sam must stick around. Out of necessity. Who knows what could happen if they derail simultaneously.

Sometimes Sane-Sam doesn't know if Insane-Sam is part of him or part of Lucifer. Sometimes their voices blend together. Sometimes he's the one singing.

Sane-Dean returns when Insane-Dean is horrified into remission by his own actions.

And then Insane-Sam sees that it's safe to come out.

* * *

***This is a line from Arthur Conan Doyle in one of the Sherlock Holmes books.**

****This song is called He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother, and it's by The Hollies.**

**A/N: So. This was a really big "Would Dean Do This?" moment for me. Obviously, I eventually arrived at the conclusion that he would, but only under extreme circumstances. When people get into a manic frenzy like this - and _especially_ if there's alcohol involved - a lot of times they just descend into a pursuit of physical comfort without thinking about what they're actually doing. Not that I'm an expert on this or anything, but I've seen some stuff... Anyway, I'll explore the mental aspect of this more in the next chapter, but I hope none of you hate me too much or find it unbelievable - he has cheated before, if you remember that episode when he and Sam are in high school. We'll see more of the ramifications of his actions in the next chapter. Please let me know what you think!**


	8. Lithium: Part 2

**A/N: Thank you so much to ImapalaLove and rosesapphire16 for reviewing! I'm so glad/relieved to hear you didn't think Dean was too OOC - I love 'im, but he's not perfect. Hope you all like this chapter.**

**Song: Lithium by Nirvana**

* * *

**CHAPTER 8**

**Lithium: Part 2**

There's no term to describe the intersection of overwhelming grief and overwhelming joy, Dean discovers. As these dissonant chords collide inside him, he searches for a name, but the closest thing he can settle upon is confusion.

One: Cas is alive.

Two: Sam is in a mental institution.

And while he feels very differently about both these things, he finds them equally difficult to process. But he forces himself to try, because he knows now what not-trying leads to.

This pitifully and blissfully ignorant version of Castiel – _Emmanuel_ – almost makes him envious. Why couldn't _he _be the one to have his memory wiped, to have all his misdeeds absolved from his conscience?

But it's a fool's wish, and it wouldn't be fair, anyway. Castiel's sins far surpass his own.

Maybe Emmanuel is _pure_ Cas, he thinks, maybe this is Cas without his influence. Maybe life isn't what corrupts, maybe _he_ is what corrupts, like that one angel said before he murdered her. Castiel had been gliding along just fine for millennia, until he came along.

No matter – Emmanuel-Cas is an angel, which means that he has the ability to heal Sam, which means he needs him.

Still, he's not above the petty. He tells him horror stories about a villain he doesn't know is himself, tells him how he betrayed them, how he screwed him up worst of all. But what he finishes with is, "I needya to take a look at my brother, Emmanuel."

And Emmanuel, empathetically, agrees.

So he races to that asylum in Oregon that makes him feel woozy every time he remembers it exists.

"_We found narcotics in his system," _the doctor had told him_. "Enough to cause someone else to overdose_. _He's lucky he's built like a horse. They didn't even knock him out – so far as we can tell, your brother hasn't slept in around a week." _Drugs. _Drugs_. Sammy, little, Boy Scout Sammy, was so lost he had turned to drugs. He could've ODed in that smoked-up car in that crack-head alley, and Dean might never have known about it because he was too busy juggling his own baggage.

Time to get your shit together, Dean. This is what you call a wake-up call. Stop it with the self-pity, the self-hatred – you can deal with it later. Right now, you've got bigger fish to fry. This voice in his head sounds a bit like John, but it is kinder than he ever would have been.

So he speeds and Emmanuel, unnerved, clutches the door-handle as though Dean is trying to kill him, as though it could even save him if Dean decided to go off the road, as though it would even hurt him if he did.

. . .

Claire is not prepared for what she sees at the foot of her bed when she wakes up one Wednesday morning. It is not, as she has come to expect, Spot, though the crystalline blue eyes are the same.

But instead, they belong to Castiel.

"Cas?!" she exclaims in combined shock and dismay and happiness.

"Hello, Claire." And there it is, that distinctive monotone rasping she thought she would never hear again. It is a direct contrast to her high-pitched shriek.

She clutches the blanket to her chest, fearful that she has slipped into another fit of delirium. "Y-you're alive?"

"Yes."

"How?!"

"To be entirely honest, I don't know. Several months ago, I awoke naked in a stream with no recollection of who I was."

She drowns a snicker at the visual. Ignoring the ludicrousness of this, she continues to interrogate, "But now you have your memories back?"

"Yes," he answers, failing to elaborate.

"W-what are you doing here?"

"I wanted to apologize personally for my abhorrent behavior. Words cannot even describe – " He pauses and sighs tiredly, starting over. "Nothing I can say can even begin to make up for what I have done. But I wanted to let you know that I am alive and how sorry I am, because you were my responsibility and I abandoned you."

"It's okay, Castiel. I managed."

"I know you did. With much difficulty. And for that, I am sorry. I should have been there to protect you – to protect all of you." He sighs again, looking cornered in his own body. "But now I must attempt to make things right. After I fix things with Sam –"

"Whoa whoa whoa, what's wrong with Sam?" she questions.

"Dean didn't tell you? Sam has suffered a rift in his subconscious – his memories of Hell are distorting his sense of reality. He's seeing visions of Lucifer and, if he continues down the road that he's on, the immense strain of sleeplessness and starvation will cause him to go into cardiac arrest."

"You mean he's gone crazy?" she sifts through his sentence.

"In so many words, yes."

"Where are they now?"

"In a mental hospital in Oregon."

"Can you take me with you? I want to see him – I want to make sure he's okay."

"Yes, I can do that."

"Alright – just let me get changed."

"Very well."

When he doesn't budge, she raises her eyebrows at him suggestively.

This makes something click in that incomprehensible brain of his, that brain that sometimes seems stuck in Heaven. An uncomfortable blush creeping up his neck, he stammers, "Oh. Right. Of course. I'll – uh – I'll be right back."

. . .

When Dean first sees Claire, he's afraid his guilt has begun to manifest itself in the form of hallucinations, and he thinks, fleetingly, maybe it's lucky he's already in a mental institution.

But no, it is truly her.

She throws her arms around him, and when he smells the familiar scent of her fruity shampoo he is hit with a tsunami of shame. He rues the moment he first saw the world painted in shades of gray. Once upon a time, he lived, protected, in a universe of absolutes. There was only right or wrong, and he did not walk the tightrope between them.

As a kid, morality had always come easily to him. There was duty and there was loyalty and there was family, and these three things together were at the epicenter of everything. Unlike the equations in Math or Chemistry or Physics, this equation had had been simple.

Girls were not factored into this. There was never any loyalty because there was never any commitment, and if there was it was unsubstantiated; he always knew there were no strings attached. As he grew older, he created a security-blanket persona for himself – rough around the edges, but with a heart of gold.

He doesn't know when the roughness began seeping beyond the edges.

And now everything is blurred. Cas is alive but he can't trust him, Sam is awake but not all-there, he needs help but Bobby's not here to help him, and nothing is the way it's supposed to be.

"How is he?" she asks, rushing over to Sam's bedside. She sweeps his lifeless chestnut locks away from his clammy brow with a great deal of affection and concern. The contours in his face are sunken – he looks hungry, haggard, and haunted.

"Not good," Dean replies, finding his voice. His answer is unnecessary; Sam's appearance speaks for itself. "He's in and out."

Her eyes fall upon the leather bindings on his wrists. "Why is he tied down?"

"They're afraid he'll hurt himself…"

All of a sudden, Sam's eyes fly open, wild and alert.

"C-Claire?"

"Yeah, Sam, it's me."

_Uh-oh_, coos Lucifer, _I sense some drama about to unfold. You should've told me she was coming – I would've made popcorn._

Sam's eyes flicker to the shadowy desk in his cell-like room. Dean, Claire, and Castiel follow his gaze, but see nothing.

"What's there, Sam?" Cas asks cautiously.

"Oh, y'know. The same old," he grunts in what appears to be an attempt at humor. He clenches his teeth so hard he can feel his molars wobble in his jawbone.

_I'll be dipped – looks like Daddy built Icarus a new set of wings._

"Lucifer?" the angel presses.

Cringing, Sam only nods in affirmation.

"So? What're we waiting for? Chop-chop, let's get this show on the road."

"Alright. But first I must assess the damage."

Castiel presses his index and middle fingers to Sam's broad forehead like a priest performing Last Rites. With Sam looking the way he does in that hospital bed, the comparison is too apt. "Oh no," he murmurs.

"What?" Dean demands viciously. He hunches over the bed, bracing himself against the rickety metal footboard. "What is it?"

"The damage is far too extensive for even my powers to heal. It isn't just his mind that is tearing, it's his soul."

"So what, Cas? What does that mean? What are we gonna do?" Claire sees his hands blanche around the iron beam. He looks to be on the brink of seizing Cas by the shoulders and shaking him in his feverish urgency, but instead he shakes the footboard and it rattles like the bars to a cage.

Castiel purses his lips, brows knitted firmly together as he contemplates this dilemma. "There may be something I can do…" he starts.

"Do it – anything that can help him, do it."

"I can't alleviate what's been done, but I may be able to shift it."

"Shift it? What does that mean?"

"I can take on Sam's pain. It would put me in a similar state to the one he's in now, but it would allow him to break free from Lucifer's hold on his mind."

"What would that do to you _exactly_?" Claire asks. "Didn't you say that if Sam stays like this he's going to die?"

"Because I'm Enochian I will not die – only my sanity would suffer."

"Are you sure you wanna do that, Cas? I mean, we gotta save Sammy, but still that's a lot to ask…"

"I will do it with pleasure, Dean. Anything I can do to make things right."

"Okay," Dean agrees, albeit unhappily. "But we'll figure out a way to get you better. This is just a temporary fix."

"Even if you cannot, I am glad that you will let me do this – I _need_ to do this."

"Alright. Alright, Cas."

Castiel smiles feebly. "Thank you."

Without further ado, he presses his entire palm to Sam's forehead. There's a burst of red light from Sam's pupils, which then travels through Castiel's veins, highlighting them like luminous spider webs, until the very same light finally reaches his pupils.

Sam gasps for breath, air inflating his lungs with a roar. He fights against his padded restraints as though someone has injected adrenaline directly into his heart, eyes just as crazed as before. His complexion looks better almost at once, and everyone is calling each other's name.

There's Dean and Claire shouting, "Sam!" and Sam questioning, "Cas? Cas, is that you?"

Castiel peers back at Sam, but only sees Lucifer.

_Oh goody, _he starts gleefully, _a new toy. How ya doin', brother?"_

Cas staggers back, away from Sam, hitting the far wall and staring at the younger Winchester in terror. Everyone else falls silent as they watch Castiel's mental state deteriorate right in front of them, knowing it is the lesser of two evils.

. . .

On their way out of the hospital, Claire asks, "You're just gonna leave him here?"

"It's safer this way," Dean says. "He's safe here. Everyone thinks he kicked the bucket already – no one will come looking. It'd be much more risky to take him with us."

Sam is dead quiet. He glares at Dean and stares at Claire with a negative-yet-unidentifiable expression lying somewhere on the spectrum between sympathy and remorse.

The first time he speaks, it's to grab Dean's elbow and yank him aside. "Can I talk to you for a sec?" he says, not waiting for a response as he drags him into a side hallway. Claire is left alone and perplexed as doctors bustle past her.

"What?" Dean hisses exasperatedly.

"What? _What_? Don't you 'what' me. She's here? Does she know?"

The muscle in Dean's jaw tenses and he averts his line of sight to a placard on one of the nearby doors. "No. She just got here – I haven't told her yet. Don't you dare say anything –"

"Oh, I won't," Sam snarls, "But you'd sure as hell better." He can't even look at her without feeling dirty, without feeling like he's complicit in his brother's indiscretion. And sure, maybe he should be thankful that Dean's saved his ass _yet again_, but right now _she's_ here and he can only remember the gross wrong he's committed.

"I will, but Sam, please –"

"Y'know, Dean, all my life I've looked up to you," he blurts out raggedly, unable to restrain himself. "You've done a lot of questionable shit before, but I've never stopped being proud to call you my brother. But now…"

"I know. I fucked up, I know."

"Do you even know what that other girl's name was?"

Dean only studies the linoleum floor, suddenly riveted by the too-clean gray and white checkers.

"Figures," Sam scoffs. "What would dad say? What would _Bobby_ say?"

"You don't think I've thought about that? I fucking know, Sammy!"

The Winchesters have always been predisposed to cinematic, larger-than-life battles, complete with histrionic shouting, passionate physical altercations, and, at times, tears of righteous fury. This fight, unlike all their others, must be contained in venomous whispers and strangled growls.

"This isn't like you, Dean. You never been selfish – that was always your problem, you've _never_ been selfish. I dunno why you decided to start now."

"Look, I wasn't thinking. I'm not used to it, okay? I'm not used to this shit, I'm not used to _not_ doing what I want, when I want, at least when it comes to stuff like that. When have you ever known me to pass up a drink, to pass up a cheeseburger, to pass up a good lay? I do that stuff because everything else is in the shitter – there's gotta be some plane of existence where I can…" He pauses, losing steam. "Where I can be free of all these constant responsibilities. And I just… I just wanted to forget that that part of me is broken too."

"You shouldn't feel like something is broken just because you care about someone other than me or Cas or Bobby or dad!" he explodes, struggling to keep his voice down. "There's something fundamentally fucked-up about that – caring about someone doesn't mean something is _wrong_ with you, it means you're human, and I know the issue is more than that because you've managed to not sow your wild oats for quite some time now. You-and-Claire isn't exactly a new thing. I don't get it – I know you, I know you better than anyone else. You talk about this just being the way you are? Well, the Dean I knew would never betray anyone he cared about."

"Yeah but it's a different kind of caring, Sam, and I don't know how the hell to deal with it!"

"So you sabotage it? Dean, listen, I wish I could help you, I do – but I just can't relate to whatever it is you're feeling. And I know you don't want me to be disappointed in you, but this isn't between you and me. It's between you and Claire. You're stalling – _she's _the one you should be talking to right now."

"Yeah, I know," he acknowledges bitterly. "And I will."

. . .

Outside, Sam shoves himself into the car immediately and Dean has to stop Claire from following suit.

"Claire, I – uh – I gotta talk to you," he tells her ominously.

She shuts the car door and approaches his where he's standing in the middle of the parking lot. It's completely vacant apart from Dean's stolen gray Honda, and Sam can see them standing, statue-like, through the windshield. The atmosphere above them is misty, but it's morning and the cloud-cover will likely burn off by mid-afternoon. You can almost see the rays of light fighting to get through, but to no avail; they are, temporarily, left without a sun, and because of this everything seems more monochromatic than it should. This lack of sunlight makes the Earth neither warm nor cold, even the temperature suspended in indecision. Sam can't help but recall Purgatory.

He can see them, but he's glad he can't hear them.

"What is it?" Claire asks quizzically.

"You're not gonna like it."

Now, caustic anxiety coils into the pit of her stomach. The rubber soles of her shoes crunch against the gravel as she shifts her weight from one foot to the other. "What's the matter?"

He drags his hand over his nose and mouth, calluses grinding audibly against what's creeping into more than just a five o'clock shadow. "I did something. Something awful."

"What did you do?" she questions gravely. Anxiety descends to panic. And now she feels all the blood flow heavily into the lower half of her body, rooting her feet in place, paralyzing her, trapping her. It pulses in her veins like a jackhammer, pulses _run run run._

"I – uh – I went to this bar, and there was this girl…"

In an instant her features bend into a look of injury that catches his heart in a death-grip. Her fists curl against her arms, and they might as well be curling around that abused organ. "You didn't…"

"It didn't go that far, but –"

"When did this happen? And how far? How far did it go?"

"A little over a week ago, right before Sammy… you know. And just – um – the basic stuff. I stopped it before it could go further. Claire, you have to understand, I wasn't thinking, I wasn't myself – I would never do anything to hurt you, never intentionally. I just… I was drunk, there was that stuff with Bobby… I wasn't in my right mind. It didn't mean anything. You've gotta believe me."

"In case you haven't noticed, _Dean_," she spits, "_no one_ is in their right mind. That's not an excuse to do whatever you want because you feel sorry for yourself."

"I know," he says, "It's not an excuse. There are no excuses. I'm so, so sorry. I just – I need you to understand that I never meant…"

"Understand _what_? Understand you wanting to sleep with someone else? How can I? I've never wanted that. I've never wanted to forget about you, I've never wanted to stop… stop caring about you."

"That's not –"

"That's exactly what it is. Do you think I'm stupid? Do you think I didn't notice how you iced everyone out as soon as Bobby died? I know how you see me, you see me as a weakness. You thought that if you fucked someone else maybe you could make the fear stop, maybe you could break the ties. Well tell me, Dean, did it work?"

"It didn-I didn't sleep with her," he insists.

"Because I should believe that. Because I should trust you."

"I swear to you, I _swear_. Why would I have told you if I was lying?"

"I don't know. I don't know, to drive me away? To make me hate you so I'll end it, so you don't have to?"

"Then why wouldn't I have just said I slept with her?"

With this, the dam bursts. "I don't know! I don't know why you told me," she cries, "I wish you hadn't! You think I need this, on top of everything? You have some fucking nerve, Dean."

"I know," he says for the millionth time, head hung low.

"You know what? Whatever. You've got bigger issues. I won't be a burden to you anymore." She starts stepping away from him, away from the car and in the direction of the main road.

"Wait, what do you mean?"

"I mean goodbye, Dean. You can count me the hell out of this. I'm gone. You don't have to worry about me – do whatever you want, fuck whoever you want, I'm out."

"Claire –"

"No, stop. This is the last straw in a pile of shit you've thrown at me this past year. I'm so tired – I can't do it anymore." She sniffs and wipes the corner of her eye with the back of her hand, oscillating between devastated and furious, and, Dean thinks, she's starting to sound like him. "No," she murmurs. "You can go back to your perfectly divided life, you can go back to the way things were before you met me, because that's obviously what you want. Just remember that it's not going to make Castiel who you thought he was, and it's sure as hell not going to bring anyone back from the dead."

* * *

**A/N: I know it doesn't seem like it, but it will get better eventually, I promise! At least we got a little more insight into Dean - sorry for all the swearing in this one lol. Tensions running high and all that. Please let me know what you think :)**


	9. Tangled Up In Blue

**A/N: Thank you so much to ImpalaLove, themightypanda, Nemu-Chan, Tenderloins, and rosesapphire16 for reviewing! You guys are amazing, and I am so so so lucky to have such consistent support from you. Your reviews truly light up my day, even if my installments are a little dark for their own good. I hope you all enjoy this chapter.**

**Song: Tangled Up In Blue by Bob Dylan**

* * *

**CHAPTER 9**

**Tangled Up In Blue**

_**SEVERAL WEEKS LATER**_

Barreling down a side-road in the suburbs of Chicago, the Winchesters sit in silence. The leaves of young, low-lying trees bubble over into the pathway, blue-toned in the moonlight. They creep in on them like the spindly fingers of some sort of monstrous dryad, ready, same as everything else, to snatch them into the dark. The sky is cloudless and the stars are clear.

Dean can't help but think, _Damn do I miss Baby_. The car he and Sam are in – he doesn't even know which type anymore because he's stopped bothering to check – is newish, bulky and plastic. He feels as though he's driving one of his old toys, blown-up in size but otherwise unaltered. Hot Wheels. His dad bought him a red one for Christmas once, the type most kids loved. Or maybe he bought it for Sam… It doesn't matter anyway, because they always shared everything – what matters is he never liked it because it didn't look like the Impala. When he can, he picks (steals) older cars, tries to preserve the memory of his lifelong companion. Nothing can ever compare.

He also can't help but think, _Damn do I miss Claire_. As of late, every major and minor detail in his life – even through the madness – thrusts her image into his brain. They're not all that far from where he first met her. And there was that case, just a day ago, with the redheaded Charlie who bore no relation to Claire's dead brother. Each time he saw the back of Charlie's head, for one ephemeral moment, his heart would clench, thinking (praying) it was Claire. But the hair color was never quite right, never quite that golden shade of red he imagines the sun will adopt when it finally decides to self-immolate. Nothing can ever compare.

When Claire first left him, the world became Dick Roman again. It wasn't until Bobby resurfaced (which, luckily, was pretty soon after) that he was able to cloak himself in the residue of… himself.

Dean had always felt haunted, so he didn't find it surprising that he hadn't noticed when he actually _was_ haunted.

Bobby is attached to the flask. Dean had buried himself in that flask, just like he had buried himself in his father's leather coat. Bobby is attached to the flask, which means he knows _all_ about Dean's recent crimes. But he doesn't say anything because the world is Dick Roman for him, too. He guesses it's hard to offer fatherly advice (or verbal abuse – Dean would welcome either) when you're teetering over the edge of going vengeful.

Sam sits beside him, wondering what his brother's thinking, wondering what's vexing him this time. It could be any number of things; lately, though, his troubles are one of the three C's: Claire, Cas, or the creatures they hunt.

He shifts in his seat, his shoulder too close to his brother's. Against his stomach and over the gentle constriction of his seatbelt, he clutches a slab of rock encased in ratty moleskin. It's heavy with a weight he doesn't understand; it might as well be a giant diamond, but he doesn't know why. And he doesn't care.

Dean seems a bit better nowadays, now that Cas is alive and Bobby is around (Bobby, though, brings with him a new set of issues they can't even begin to deal with yet). He always had trouble with the abruptness of death. He could never get past it because he could never get past that darkest moment, that moment when it all ends. For Dean, death isn't a life ending, it's a piece of his world ending.

Some pieces are larger than others.

Sam knows he is a large piece of this world, maybe even the largest. He thinks, all the time, _What if Dean had just let me die? _There would have been no deal, no Hell, no angels, no Apocalypse, no Purgatory, no Leviathans. One death could have prevented a shitload of others.

But Dean could not accept that darkest moment, and his will was so strong he did the impossible – he escaped it, blasting a crater of spilled dominoes in the process. He would've rather died than live through it, and he did.

This part of Dean makes him nervous. This part of Dean makes it hard to predict what choices he is capable of making, how far he is willing to go.

This part of Dean makes him worry he'll go down fighting Dick Roman if he thinks it's the only way.

Dean has never been suicidal, but he's never been _not_ suicidal, either. He would never kill himself. But maybe _maybe_ he would let something else do it for him.

This thought jolts him. It makes him remember things he never wants to remember, makes him hear the distant echo of hellhounds and fills his nostrils with the smell of coppery blood.

He feels a pang of affection, like he used to when they were kids all those times Dean let him have the Cap'n Crunch, all those times he took care of him when he had the flu, all those times he read him stories about valiant knights and fire-breathing dragons. This feeling – this desire to grab onto his brother and never let go – hasn't surfaced in years. "You okay, man?"

Dean peers at Sam for no more than a blink, readjusting his grip on the steering wheel.

"I'm fine," he says. "Why?"

"You look… tense."

Dean laughs and it almost sounds genuine – maybe it is. "No shit?"

"You know what I mean. We'll figure out how to kill Dick Roman. We've got this… _whatever it is _that's so important to them. We'll figure it out."

"I know." In reality, Dean is simpler than Sam thinks – right now, he's only longing for his car and his girl.

These things don't even cross Sam's mind, except for maybe Claire; but, to him, this problem is outrageously ordinary compared to everything else. It does confuse him, though. He wonders how his brother can be so good at wooing women and so god-awful at everything that comes after. But then again, most people never experience their first real relationship past the age of thirty – he's probably pretty emotionally stunted in that department.

Anyway, there's no point in wondering because Dean has issued a ban on the topic.

"_We already talked about it once, Sam. I'm done. There's nothing else to say. Don't you ever fucking mention her to me again." _As though Claire is out of his life for good, as though he has a monopoly on her. Wasn't it him who told him all those years ago that Claire was part of this to begin with?

They arrive at a vacated mill and Sam doesn't know why Dean has chosen this place, or how he even knew it existed. He doesn't ask questions, though, because the answers are irrelevant.

Dean exits the car, grinning something borderline enthusiastic. "Let's figure out what the hell this thing is, shall we?"

Sam wants to match his tone, but can't. Dean was always better at stowing away his issues than he was. "Yeah. Let's go."

. . .

It crosses their minds that maybe taking a hammer to this precious slab of clay is not the wisest course of action. But Dean says _Fuck it_ and they continue nevertheless. Sam briefly muses, In what universe is it ever anyone's first instinct to smash something to dust before they know what it is? But that's Dean for ya.

The first blow brings a clamor of thunder. They freeze, and, Sam thinks, _Isn't it usually lightning that comes first?_

Dean stares at the high, pipe-scarred ceiling, as though it is somehow to blame. "What the hell was that?" Maybe it was a coincidence, he tells himself, knowing there's no such thing.

"I-I dunno."

Dean keeps his eyes raised, before lowering the hammer once more. Another clash rings out and, this time, a flash of lightning illuminates the entire room. It is so ugly and dilapidated they almost wish it hadn't.

Dean makes a crack about Thor, but Sam's eyes spell uncertainty.

"Maybe we should stop."

"Ha. Yeah, okay."

Another pound. Another roll of thunder and lightning. And a fissure in the slab.

"See, Sammy? Nothing to worry about."

"It was perfectly clear weather when we got here, Dean."

Dean whistles – _whistles_, like a fucking miner – and keeps hammering away haphazardly. He competes with the wind, whistling just as loudly as it pours through the broken windows, shuttling in a cool mist of rain along with it. Intermittent gusts jangle the rusty windowpanes ominously, and raindrops slam into the outer wall.

The storm is almost as thunderous as the thunder itself. The clouds, dense and black like smoke, seem to be screeching out a warning, and Sam is sure they've finally done it – they've finally incited the wrath of God. He half-expected it to come someday soon, anyway.

He is actually surprised that they break the slab apart before they are smote.

From the clay emerges a tablet, covered in hieroglyphics that, Sam wagers from his rudimentary knowledge of Mesopotamian history, vaguely resemble cuneiform.

"What the fuck is that?" Dean asks his younger brother, for some indiscernible reason expecting him to have the answer.

"The hell if I know."

What they also don't know is that approximately thirty seconds ago, somewhere in Michigan, a seventeen-year-old boy was struck by a bolt of lightning.

. . .

Still in the abandoned mill, the Winchesters are tucked into their sleeping bags.

"_I just need two hours," Sam had said, yawning. "Two hours."_

Dean, who awoke after one, has already allowed his brother to sleep for four. He stares at the zigzagging pipes above, thinking about how he's failed so many times, how he's so close now, how he's not going to fail this time.

He just needs to figure out what the goddamn tablet says.

He casts a sidelong glance to his brother, who is sleeping peacefully for the first time in far too long. You've gotta be dead-tired to fall asleep on this glass-encrusted floor, Dean thinks, and he doesn't want to wake him up. Luckily for him, he won't have to – pinkish sunlight is starting to stream in from the enormous windows, bearing no trace of the squall that ended mere hours ago.

Suddenly, his cell phone rings. He picks it up in irritation, wondering who the hell could be calling him at this time of morning.

"Hello?"

"Mr. Michelson?" comes an unfamiliar female voice.

"Uh – yes?"

"This is Oregon State Hospital on the line – you're listed as an emergency contact for an Emmanuel Novak, is that correct?" Ah – _that's_ who's calling. Someone in a different time zone.

"Yeah, yeah, that's right," he replies hurriedly.

"We thought we should notify you that Mr. Novak emerged from his coma this morning – he's doing quite well, considering."

"Okay. Okay, I'll come as soon as I can."

"Alright, sir. Visiting hours are 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM during the week, and 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM on weekends."

"Okay. Thank you." He chucks the phone in the direction of his duffle and doesn't watch to see how close it falls.

"Sammy," he says, jostling his brother's limp form. "You gotta get up – Cas is awake."

"Mmm, what?" He rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms, before squinting at Dean. His hair hangs around his face, framing it, making him look more disheveled than the occasion calls for.

"Cas. C'mon, c'mon, we gotta go now. Maybe he'll be able to read the tablet."

. . .

Castiel, outfitted in clinical white scrubs and his trademark trench coat, holds the slab up to the light, facing the window.

Cas is still loco – they realized _that_ right away – but at least he's talking.

"This is definitely Enochian," he tells them. "But it is not in any script I can decipher. You may have… you may have stumbled upon the Word of God." Little does he know, they most certainly did not '_stumble_ _upon_' it.

"The Word of God?" Dean bursts out exasperatedly. "Jesus, you've gotta be kidding me. That's just fucking awesome."

"I am fairly certain that Jesus is not kidding you," he hazards, "but yes, it is quite awe-inspiring…" He continues, fascinated, "Did you know that bees produce honey by cyclically consuming their own vomit."

Dean balks at the non sequitur, an appalled look plastered across his features, but not because of the content of Castiel's outburst.

Sam, on the other hand, tentatively replies, "Yeah, uh, I, uh, I actually did know that."

Cas grins broadly at him, and the sight is so foreign it is inherently unsettling.

Shaking away his troubled agitation, Dean demands, "So if you can't read it, who can?"

"Why, a Prophet of the Lord, of course."

There's a flicker of something tormented in Dean's eyes, but it passes swiftly.

"Claire?" supplies Sam.

"No, silly, not _Claire_. Different prophets have different purposes – translating the Word of God is not Claire's."

"Then what're we supposed to do?" snaps Dean. "The Leviathans dug up half the friggen world to find this thing, and you're telling me we don't have any way of reading it?"

Castiel shrugs without a care in the world, still smiling serenely. "I don't know."

. . .

Later in the day (or really _night_ would be more accurate), a scrawny teenaged boy, for no apparent reason, shows up out of nowhere at the hospital and nicks the tablet. The brothers chase him into the woods behind the building; Sam grabs him by the scruff of his coat and lifts him clean off the ground like a ragdoll.

"Who the hell are you?!" Dean grills, jabbing his finger into the kid's bony chest.

"I-I-I'm Kevin Tran," he stutters, as though it explains everything. Beneath his floppy curtain of black hair, they can see his eyes bugging out of his head in terror.

"Who sent you? What are you doing with the tablet?"

"Wha-n-no one, no one sent me!"

"What are you doing with the tablet," Sam says more evenly, repeating his brother's question. He gives him a shake for good measure, but it's halfhearted.

"I-I swear, I don't know – I just-I just woke up in the morning a-a-and I drove all day and all night and all day again from Michigan to get here, like something was calling me, I didn't know what I was doing," he rambles. "God, I-I missed my exam yesterday morning, I'm so so so screwed, I – "

"You came all the way from Michigan?"

Kevin nods furiously, bangs swishing.

"When did this happen? When did you start driving?"

"R-right after that storm, I don't know, around midnight –"

"There was a storm?" Sam butts in, seemingly on the cusp of an epiphany.

"Yeah, a really bad one – thunder and lightning and everything."

The Winchester brothers lock eyes.

Sam: "You think –"

Dean: "All the way in Michigan?"

"It can't be a coincidence. And Cas, too – the same night?"

Sam drops Kevin to his feet, but not before wrestling the messenger bag containing the tablet away from him. He stares at the kid incredulously when he puts up a fight.

He isn't free for more than a moment before Dean digs his nails into his elbow and leads him towards the darkened hospital.

"W-where are we going?"

"To consult an expert," drawls Dean, convinced the kid, strange as he is, isn't much of a threat.

"I-I think the building is closed," he points out shrewdly.

Dean smirks. "Don't you worry about that."

After breaking into both the hospital and the secure ward (and after gagging Kevin with the rag that Dean uses for myriad purposes – most often as a tourniquet), they finally reach Cas.

"Hello again, my friends," he greets, sitting on the edge of his bed. The lights in his cramped room (that same room Sam suffered in – they remember) have been shut off, and it doesn't seem as though he's stopped grinning since they left. It's starting to look sinister, more like a baring of teeth than a smile.

Dean shoves Kevin roughly at his feet and removes the cloth from his mouth. "Talk," he orders.

"My name is Kevin Tran," he begins fearfully. "P-please don't hurt me – I'm an AP student – I don't even know how I got here – "

"Did you say your name is Kevin Tran?" Castiel interrupts.

The boy nods again.

The loopy angel stares off, past them all and through the door like he can find the meaning of life in the frosted glass. "That is most interesting," he says to himself.

"What?" Dean barks. "What is it?"

The sound snaps Castiel back to the present, but his focus is not on Dean. Staring Kevin squarely in the eyes (mechanically, like he is programmed to do so), he says, "Kevin Tran, you are a Prophet of the Lord."

The sentence lingers in the air, like dust trying to settle. Both brothers hold their breath, under the impression that without their inhaling and exhaling it'll hit the ground faster.

"No," Dean interjects finally. "No, that's not right – didn't you say that only one prophet can exist at a time?"

Cas lets out a low hum of confirmation. He turns gracefully to look out the pitch-black window.

"But," Dean goes on, his mind putting together the most atrocious puzzle, "no, that would mean – Claire, she's fine, she's safe – we just saw her a couple of weeks ago."

However, upon looking into Sam's eyes, he feels a serrated blade slide into his gut. It doesn't hurt at first…

But then it is excruciating.

"No," he insists, now absorbed with the task of believing his own frantic explanations, now absorbed with the task of not bleeding-out. "No, that can't be – it's gotta be a mistake."

Sam, always clutch under stress, somehow maintains his composure and applies pressure to the wound. "Dean – you go to South Dakota and check on Claire. I'll stay here and deal with this. I'm sure she's fine. We'll figure it out."

Dean, unused to being directed by little Sammy, can only nod dumbly.

There are so many things he wants to say, so many things they don't have time for. But he and Sam, they never needed words. He looks at his brother and he sees, _I can handle this._

_But Dick Roman, but the Leviathans –_

_Go. I can handle this. Trust me._

And, what Sam expects to see is _I do_, but what he actually sees is, _I want to._

* * *

**A/N: Dun dun dunnn. Sorry for the cliffhanger! You can expect an update pretty soon, though, so you won't have to wait it out too long. Please let me know what you think! :)**


	10. Paint It Black

**A/N: Sorry for the slight delay, my friends. This chapter is extra long, so I hope you'll forgive me. As always, thank you so much to Nemu-Chan, rosesapphire16, Wolflihood, ImpalaLove, Tenderloins, and themightypanda for reviewing! You guys are awesome, and I'm so glad you care what happens to Claire! It's always such a relief when your OC is well-received. I hope you all enjoy this chapter (warning: MAJOR S7 spoilers ahead).**

**Song: Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones**

* * *

**CHAPTER 10**

**Paint It Black**

It takes almost exactly twenty-four hours to drive to Sioux Falls, and Dean has been in a heightened state of panic for the entirety of it. He can taste it in the back of his mouth, bitter and chalky. This must be how Sam felt in Purgatory, he thinks, how it feels to be eternally under siege.

He parks the car, now banged-up, sideways in Jody Mills' driveway. Moonlight streams over the house, illuminating it from the back and casting a symmetrical shadow on the front lawn. There's an orange streetlamp next to her mailbox that's whirring and flickering like a dying firefly.

Dean sees a warm glow emanating from one of the living room windows, but it does nothing to comfort him.

People die with the lights on all the time.

As he flings himself out of the car, the stillness of the neighborhood contrasts starkly with his racing heart. He sprints to the door and feels lightheaded, a repercussion of not having eaten or slept in more than a day. In fact, he's probably experiencing some sort of cardiovascular episode that is more severe than just that.

He pushes through the dizziness.

He knocks once, then kicks the door in.

There's a squeal of shock in the next room.

"Claire!" he bellows.

The person in question rushes into the mudroom, pajama-clad and altogether unscathed.

"_Dean?!_"

He sees that she is not injured, but his mind has not yet registered that they are out of danger. He's overturns the house, wrenching open every door, turning the lights on in every closet, flexing his fingers on the hilt of his drawn machete.

"What the fuck are you doing?" she demands hysterically, following him up and down the stairs.

"Where's Jody?" he demands right back.

"At Bobby's!"

"_Why_?"

"Because she's been sorting through his stuff after work!"

"No no no no _no_," he chants. "The Leviathans know where Bobby lives – lived – remember? They can easily follow her back here!"

He continues scouring the home for signs of hostiles and then moves on to the yard, uprooting shrubbery, chopping off branches, and glowering at old Mr. Randall's house across the street. She follows him outside, but not before wrapping a robe around her nightgown and her arms around herself.

"Get back inside," she hisses, "You're acting like a lunatic!"

Dean complies, but retains the deranged glint in his eye.

"There are _no_ Leviathans here," she assures him.

The door, partially broken, falls softly closed behind them but doesn't click into place.

Dean then looks at Claire, as if for the first time. Her hair is tied in a sloppy bun and her expression is half-dumbfounded and half-irate.

"You wanna explain what the _hell_ is wrong with you?"

He blinks away his frenzied trance, yellow-flecked eyes becoming clear. Without a word, he takes two long strides towards her and kisses her straight on the mouth.

She pushes against his chest, but his hands stay cradling her face. "What are you doing?!"

"I'm so sorry, Claire, I'm so sorry," he professes.

"No," she snaps, "You don't get to do that."

"Please… I thought… I thought –"

She knows what he thought.

"But _why_?"

He presses his lips to hers again; this time she doesn't shove him away, but she doesn't reciprocate either. Between kisses, he says, "I'll – explain – later."

_Now_, she shoves him away.

"Explain now," she commands, but her gaze is foggy – lustful. He finds this encouraging.

"Bobby's a ghost –" he kisses her again, hypnotically " – Cas is still batshit insane –" and again, this time rolling her lower lip between his teeth " – there's another prophet."

"Wha-?" she mumbles against his mouth, his mouth that tastes the same as she remembers, like spearmint masking whiskey and blood.

"Doesn't matter," he says, similarly muffled.

He loves her hair, but he's glad she's pulled it up – it gives him unimpeded access to her throat, and jaw line, and…

Her determination is melting, especially as Dean rakes his hands over her obliques. She shudders, and he musters the gall to rove further north. Soft. Exposed. She's not even wearing a bra, and it's making him crazy. He knows this is probably too much too soon, that she's still angry with him, that he hasn't made up for what he's done, that he doesn't deserve this – but he's just so _glad_…

This is a terrible, terrible decision, she thinks offhandedly, but it's happening so fast and it's been so _long_…

By the time he hoists her up and carries her upstairs, her determination has evaporated. He has a way of making her feel small in every sense of the word – this is the only sense she enjoys. There's just something about him picking her up… so strong, so concrete…

Is it stupid? Probably. Does it feed his latent misogyny? Possibly. But she'll be damned if feeling Dean's muscles curl around her entire body isn't one of the sexiest things she's ever experienced.

"First room on the right," she orders blindly into his hot, inviting mouth. And soon her tongue and teeth are drawing circles on his neck (because she knows he likes that) and again the taste is the same, faintly like salt, and the smell is the same, too – leather (even though he's not wearing any) and gunpowder.

He kicks the door closed behind them, before pressing her – still elevated – against it. It's all a blur when he jams his knee between her legs and she's just wearing a nightgown, she thinks, and she whimpers, mad at herself for letting this happen, mad at him for showing up, mad at God for creating them in the first place.

She doesn't want to give in, she doesn't…

_Oh,_ but she does. And, to her immense chagrin, he can feel it on his denim-covered thigh. Already her lips are grappling with his on their own accord, and soon enough her hands join the mutiny. _Dammit, Claire_, she internally reprimands herself. But her admonitions quickly change course and, as he somehow manages to shift his hands around, morph into a labored, "_Jesus Christ, Dean…"_

He chuckles into her coconut-scented shoulder; her words stroke his ego, her nails claw his shoulders. His movements are limited because he is using most of his body to support hers, but god-knows he can make the best of a tight situation.

She has far more flexibility. Her fingers sneak beneath his shirt and skim over his taut belly, and then lower…

There's a whoosh of movement and she opens her eyes and she's on the bed and her clothes are pointless, _pointless_, because her nightgown has already ridden up all the way. It's not fair, she thinks, wondering where her robe went. She's pleased to see that at least somewhere along the way he's lost his jacket and flannel, and hastens to liberate him from his t-shirt. In something akin to amusement, he looms above her for a split-second, before fusing his lips to hers in desperation. He tastes her lips, her skin, _her skin_…

And then stops abruptly.

"Claire, wait," he pants. His pupils, fully dilated, dart back and forth frenetically as he reads her face.

She glares at him in mystified bewilderment. Her pulse is pounding in her veins, as though her blood is trying to force her skin up to reach him.

"I love you," he blurts out, unbidden.

Eyes still cloudy and scowl still firmly in place, she considers him for several stretching moments. Is he drunk? she thinks, Did he drive here drunk? Did he eat another dodgy sandwich? But he seems as sober as he ever does, even if he's drugged on pheromones.

Eventually she replies, as though it's obvious:

"I know."

He laughs something guttural and unhinged, fingers twitching against (and _tickling_) her pale hipbones.

"You know I love you too," she amends. "But what difference does it make?"

"All the difference," he declares cryptically, grazing his teeth over her collarbone. And again, muted, "_All the difference_."

. . .

Dean and Claire sleep for far too long, mostly because they were up far too late. Claire wakes first, and when she does her stomach lurches momentarily at the realization that Jody most _definitely_ heard them, at least three articles of clothing are scattered somewhere in the house, _and_ the front door is broken. (And Dean's car is blocking the entire driveway).

At the moment, though, she doesn't care. _At the_ _moment_, her body is twisted around Dean's, utterly unclothed. Their idiotically matching tattoos peek above the covers, and they're settled into the position they slept in almost every night for a year – her arm flung across his torso, their legs braided.

She wonders if she has forgiven him and genuinely doesn't know. What she _does_ know is that she can never be without him, and this insight is perhaps more relevant.

She also wonders what's wrong with her, why she is so hopelessly ensnared by him.

Some might say, _You're in love, dear_, but she's not buying it. She feels like a junkie and Dean is her heroin. Is love supposed to make you feel self-destructive and certifiable? She hopes not.

In any case, it doesn't matter. He's snoozing next to her, long lashes splayed across his freckled-dusted cheekbones, full lips slightly parted. He may be a total douchebag, but at least he's pretty.

As though he can feel her inspecting him, his eyelids flutter halfway open, revealing those green eyes that are always changing hue. Right now, they're the color of autumn leaves, and his nondescript eyebrows arch to frame them.

"Mmm creepy," he mumbles groggily.

She digs the heel of her palm painfully between his ribs, but grins. Her teeth, thanks to three full years of orthodontia, are perfect. She settles her head back onto his chest and tightens her grip around him.

From his vantage point, he can only see the pointed tip of her nose and the spread of light-catching eyelashes. Hers is an almost elflike sort of beauty – not like his beloved Busty Asian Beauties, not like the blonde vixens of Casa Erotica, not like sultry brunette bartenders he used to trip over himself to hit on.

He lays a kiss on the crown of her head.

"You wanna elaborate on what you were saying last night?" she prods, but only because what he said sounded important. "Bobby's ghost? Another prophet?"

Dean winces, his fucked-up life flooding back to him.

"There's this kid – a high school kid – Cas says he's a prophet."

She can feel his body rumble beneath her ear as he speaks, the pitch of his voice low and soothing. The sound sends reverberations all the way to her toes.

"But I thought there could only be one prophet at a time?"

Dean's hand finds itself on her bare shoulder, tracing patterns on the unmarred skin absently. "I know," he says grimly. "That's why I rushed here."

"There's something I should mention, I guess," she starts. "I-I stopped getting visions. And then I got really sick."

He looks down at her intently, causing her to meet his gaze. "Sick?" he questions.

"Yeah… I thought it was the flu, but…"

"But?"

"Well, it was kind of… kind of like withdrawal."

"Like, drug withdrawal?"

"Yeah."

"You think it had something to do with the visions?"

"I don't know. But those two things happened almost at the same time. It was almost like…"

"… Like your body was cleansing itself."

"Yeah. Like it was cleansing itself of the visions. But Cas said it was forever, didn't he? He said I would be a prophet forever."

"Cas has been wrong before," he grinds out.

"Maybe."

"Maybe this new prophet overruled you – maybe it's because of the tablet."

"The tablet?"

He explains the tablet, how only Kevin Tran can read it, how he showed up the same time they found it.

"So… I'm not a prophet anymore? Just like that?"

"It could just be temporary. I don't know. I have no friggen idea. But just like you were activated, I guess it makes sense that you could be _de_activated"

Claire sighs, almost relieved. He can feel the air leave her lungs.

"And Bobby?"

Now it's his turn to sigh. "Bobby's a ghost."

"But his body – "

"He's attached to his old flask. Turns out I've been carting him around for weeks without even knowing it."

She stares up at him in vague dismay, eyes wide. "He's not…"

"I left the flask with Sam," he snickers. "Don't worry."

There are several moments of silence, during which time they stay stuck to one another, unwilling to move.

Eventually Claire says, "You should go tell Jody you're here. She'll want to know."

This time, Dean full-out laughs. "I think she already does know, Einstein. She probably noticed the car, and you weren't exactly quiet. _Oh God Dean, oh, oh, please, Dean, yes_," he imitates crudely. "Pretty sure you said my name about a bazillion times."

Claire gawks in horror and slaps him hard on his sternum, the sound of skin cracking against skin resounding loudly through the room.

"Ow!"

"Screw you!" she bites, squirming out of bed and throwing some clothes on.

"You already took care of that," he continues to goad.

"You're an asshole. Real mature, Dean. What is this, the ninth grade?"

Still grinning evilly, he gets out of bed and pulls on his boxers in one fluid motion. "Aw, c'mon. I'm just kiddin.'"

"Yeah, well, you'd better be careful. You're not out of the doghouse yet," she says, even though they both know it's a lie.

. . .

All of them – Dean, Claire, Sam, Castiel, and Kevin – meet in a man named Rufus' partially-decaying cabin at the quasi-halfway point, in Whitefish, Montana. It's a _log_ cabin, the type of old-school back-woods thing Claire had only ever read about.

"We know what to do," says Sam upon greeting his brother and Claire. "Kevin translated the tablet – it's about the Leviathans."

"Yeah?" Dean demands urgently. "What does it say?"

"It says how to kill them," Kevin answers, looking downtrodden. There are protruding bags under the boy's eyes, darkening his skin like smears of ash. The remainder of his complexion is pallid, and the sheen of dried sweat is causing his stringy hair to adhere to his forehead – he appears almost feverish, but it is unclear whether his state has been caused by anxiety or his abilities as a prophet.

"Are you Kevin?" Claire asks, and he nods.

"How uncanny," Castiel remarks cheerily. "Two prophets under one roof."

"Yeah," Dean replies cagily. "You said that was impossible."

"Evidently I was mistaken, since Claire appears to be very much alive." His features suddenly grow solemn. "You _are_ alive, aren't you Claire?"

Her brow creases in puzzlement, but she says, "Yes, Cas, I'm alive."

He breaks into that disturbing grin again. "Good. You know, with Bobby…"

"I'm right here, ya winged bastard," snaps Bobby, materializing out of thin air.

"Now it's a goddamn party," Dean mutters under his breath.

"I heard that, boy. Watch your mouth."

"Is it just me, or is he even grumpier than usual?" Claire hisses to Sam.

"It's not just you," he mutters enigmatically in response.

"Good to see you too, Bobby," she drawls when he doesn't acknowledge her.

"Yeah, yeah, my heart's bleedin'. 'nough with the pleasantries."

"Are you all right?"

"Hell naw I ain't all right. Do I look all right to you? I'm a ghost, for Christ's sakes." He looks mostly the same, apart from the fact that his lips have paled significantly.

"Sorry…"

"Anyway, I presume these idjits briefed ya?"

"We were just getting to that…" says Sam.

"The hell're ya waitin' for? I ain't gettin' any younger!"

"You're not getting any _older_, either," Castiel points out sagely.

Through the pandemonium, Kevin erupts, "In order to kill a Leviathan you need a bone of a righteous mortal washed in the three bloods of the fallen."

Everyone goes quiet, and Claire and Dean – to whom this is news – stare at him blankly.

After a pause, Dean bursts out, "What the hell does that mean?"

"I reckon it means you need to soak the bone of a righteous mortal in the blood of something from Heaven, from Hell, and from the other place – Purgatory."

"An angel, a demon, and a what?" Dean works through.

"An alpha, I think," Sam assists. "We looked into it – there's a lot of lore about all monsters coming from a single source."

"What, like a big-daddy Purgatory monster?"

"More like a big-daddy werewolf or vampire or shapeshifter or – you get the picture."

"So what, we gotta find one of these things and get its blood?"

"Essentially. The fallen angel – well, we've got Cas, and… Well, the demon's gotta be the head demon – 'the Ruler of Fallen Humanity.' The best I figure it, that means Crowley. And while we all know he's a complete and utter asshat, I'm willing to bet he wants Dick dead as much as we do. The alpha will be the tricky part."

"Well," Dean starts, his mouth twisting into a smirk, "let's not waste any more time. You know what I always say – if it bleeds, we can kill it."

. . .

"We are getting _way_ too cozy with Crowley nowadays," says Dean as they summon him in the center of Rufus' otherwise-heavily-warded cabin.

It's been a couple of days since they initially formed their game plan. So far, they have been able to procure the bone of a righteous mortal (thanks to Sister Mary Constant, d. 1983), the blood of a fallen angel (Castiel), and the blood of an alpha (this was no walk in the park – but Edgar the Vampire apparently hates Dick just as much as everyone else). All that's left is the blood of a demon.

"Frankly, I'm wounded," comes Crowley's lilting voice. He is bearded, as though he's been too preoccupied with something to shave. "And here I was, thinking how lovely it is that we're becoming so intimate with one another. You Winchesters really know how to kick 'em where it hurts, don't you?"

"You can say that again," Dean growls.

Crowley raises an eyebrow, a smile playing mischievously at his lips. "I presume you'll be wanting a vial of my blood," he says. "Pity, I'm in no mood to negotiate under the barbaric coercion of a Devil's Trap."

Dean nods Sam the go-ahead to break the trap.

"Much better," Crowley says, grinning.

Sam begins, "How did you know –"

"_King of Hell_, remember?" he interrupts, rolling his eyes in annoyance. "Anyway, I was going to simply _offer_ it to you, but now that I see Wings here, I'm perplexed. _You're _supposed to be dead, you sniveling, overreaching, _bloody idiotic_ –"

"_Alright_, that's enough," says Dean warily.

"My point is, why aren't you?"

"I, uh, don't know," replies Castiel. "To be honest, I haven't even been up to Heaven – I keep thinking, 'there are no insects up there,' but here we have trillions…"

Cas blathers on, and as he does Crowley gapes at Dean incredulously. It's bizarre and a bit unnerving to see these two share a look of understanding.

Castiel finishes, "… They're making honey, and silk – miracles, really."

"What are you talking about?" Crowley finally responds, looking no more enlightened.

"Um… preferring insects to angels, I guess," he says, shoving his hands into his pockets. He steps towards Crowley, digging a Ziploc bag filled with what appears to be honey out of his coat. "Here," he says, offering it to him, "a token, if you'd like. I collected it myself."

Again, Crowley looks to Dean for assistance and explanation; he can offer none.

"I see… He's completely off his rocker," the Brit ventures. "Karma's a bitch, innit?"

"Look," Dean starts, "this isn't about Cas right now. Do you want to end Dick or not?"

"Indeed, I do – or is it did? I'll leave that for you to decide. In any case, here," he reaches into his jacket pocket and extends a vial of blood, "a prezzy."

"Really? Just boxed and ready to go? And just _what_ exactly are you leaving us to decide?" questions Sam, one eyebrow quirked skeptically.

"Dick may be a dick, but he isn't a moron," Crowley replies. "Why do you think he's nabbed your prophet? The other one, I mean. The frail and skittish one. He knows you lot are amassing the ingredients to kill him – he reached out to me and tried to offer me a deal."

"In exchange for what?" Dean interrogates.

"My giving you the wrong blood," he says nonchalantly, staring pensively at the vial. "I know Amy Winehouse here can sniff out the real thing – test it yourself, if you like. This is demon, but is it mine?"

"Why are you telling us this?" Claire demands.

He smirks. "Oh Clary, I nearly forgot you were here – such a treasure, sitting quietly while the men-folk talk… They just don't make 'em like that anymore, do they, Dean?"

At this, Dean glares venomously at him. "Shut up," he orders.

Unfazed, he continues, "I dunno why I'm telling you this, love. Like I said, I'll leave that for you to decide… Oh – and keep an eye on Crazy-Pants. Hilariously, he's vital to what you're trying to accomplish."

Without elaborating, he tosses the vial to Dean and dematerializes.

. . .

The climax of their mission is just as fraught with drama and tension and pressure as any of their others, and Sam wonders, if he lives past this one, how many more will follow.

Dean and Cas have the bone; Dick must have stashed a piece of the real Dick Roman somewhere before eating him, because he's managed to make at least a dozen replicas of himself. Cas, who let the Leviathans into this world in the first place, is the only one who can tell them apart. He's the eyes of the operation, and Dean is the grunt.

Claire and Sam also sneak into the Leviathans' headquarters, but to find Kevin and blow the factory. The company is one Dick Roman has only recently acquired, called SucroCorp, and they're planning to manufacture food additives that drug the general public – Dean's Turducken sandwich was the prototype, engineered to make people complacent for the Leviathans' consumption. In sum, if they succeed, much of the world's population will become stoned farm animals.

Needless to say, the stakes are high.

Spectral Bobby, meanwhile, creates a diversion in the parking lot to draw attention away from the others.

The weather doesn't fit the mood. It's one of the first days of spring, and the sun is trying to reheat the earth back to life; it gleams, brilliant even through the occasional cloud. The sky seems even bluer against the dark outline of the still-bare trees, reflecting none of the chaos below.

Bobby, his flask in the passenger's seat, crashes the Impala into the SucroCorp sign in front of the building, shattering the placid atmosphere and drawing out a horde of low-rank Leviathans.

Kevin is already in the process of trying to escape when Sam and Claire find him, picking the lock to his prison with a bobby pin. He is kneeling in front of the door when Sam kicks it open, and he is immensely fortunate he dove out of the way in time, otherwise his nose would likely be crooked and gushing blood.

Claire wraps her left hand – the one that isn't holding a metallic suitcase – around his slender wrist. "We've gotta go," she orders.

"T-they have my mom," he protests.

"Not for long," Sam says, "Once we kill Dick, the whole hierarchy is gonna crumble. We'll get your mom, don't worry."

Dragging Kevin along behind them, they make their way to the assembly line and set their homemade pipe bomb to detonate in fifteen minutes.

"We gotta find Dean and Cas," Sam then says. "Let's hustle."

He leads the triumvirate, peeking through each office door in search of his brother.

It happens in a matter of seconds, and since he is in front of everyone, he's the only one who sees it. The scene unfolds before him through the square glass, almost as though it is on a television screen. He sees Dean, with Dick in front of him and Castiel holding his head back. Without a moment's hesitation, Dean plunges the bone through Dick's throat. He flounders, black goo oozing from his nose and mouth and the air around him pulsating; then, his body explodes into a geyser of the same black fluid, splattering all over the walls and window, obscuring his view.

Sam shoves the door open to see the final outcome.

At first, when it happens, they think there must have been some mistake. They walked into the wrong room, they chose the wrong door – that's gotta be it. There's nothing there. There's _not even anything there_. There's no body, no blood – just black.

But Sam saw, Sam _saw_. His brother, and Castiel, he saw them.

But there's no evidence they were ever there.

"Where'd they go," asks Claire, like it's an innocent question, like they may have just popped down to the convenience store to pick up a soda and a pack of gum.

"I… I don't know."

"Guys…" starts Kevin, "We should go. The – the bomb…"

"Hello, chums," says Crowley suddenly, materializing behind them, out of the blue. "Good work – without a leader, the Levis are just another monster. Hard to stomp, sure, but you love a challenge. _Your_ job is to keep them from organizing."

But Sam only has one thing on his mind. "Where's Dean?" he demands, stricken.

Crowley bares his teeth in a wince and shrugs. "That bone… has a bit of a kick. God Weapons often do – they should put a warning on the box."

"Where are they, Crowley?!" Sam shouts raggedly.

"Can't help you, Sam." He snaps his fingers, and suddenly two demons flank Kevin. "Now, I know our former Miss America here," he points to Claire, "is just about useless now that this fresh young thing has replaced her, so I'm just gonna take the one."

The demons – along with Kevin – disappear.

"You got what you wanted," Crowley goes on, as if it's some consolation. "Dick's dead, you saved the world, so I want _one_ little prophet. Sorry Moose, Red – wish I could help." And there's something in his tone that almost makes them believe him. "You've certainly got a lot on your plate right now… Looks like you are well, and truly, on your own," he finishes, as though even he – even _he_, the fucking King of Hell – pities them.

B-but

No

That can't be right

Who said what? How did they do that – complete each other's sentences? It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter at all.

Because Dean is gone – vanished – and Castiel too, but _Dean_.

_No body_. Nothing to hold onto.

"No," Claire repeats again, "No." There's finality in it, like a child stamping her foot. Like it will make a difference. Like anyone is listening.

Crowley leaves too, and they almost wish he didn't.

Sam's mind rewinds to howling beasts and stinking blood. Not the images straight-on, but the colors (Red. Now black) moving on a white ceiling, where he looked when he couldn't bear to look anymore, and he thinks, _Nonono, this can't be happening, this can't be real, fuck, Jesus, not again, please, not again_, and something inside him is breaking and it's his resolve.

_Not again not again not again. _

She turns to him. "Sam, _no_."

But he can already feel his insides coming undone.

"No, Sam, no, I mean, I mean, people don't just disappear, he can't – he can't be, where did he go?"

"He's gone, Claire, he's not here."

"No, no. No, it's not possible."

"Claire…"

"NO!" she shrieks, wailing like a banshee. The sound is so overwrought and raw that it actually causes him to flinch. He thinks maybe she tore up her vocal chords.

She turns to God, first. She thinks, I was a prophet, once, that's gotta count for something. She's making trades in her mind, she's bargaining, _Give me the visions back, if you have to. I'll do anything, please, I'll do anything. I'm sorry I ever complained about them, I'm so sorry. I'll do anything. _

When God doesn't answer, she turns elsewhere.

"G-g-get Crowley back here, make him make a deal – that's what you guys do, right? Make deals? We can make a deal…"

"No, Claire, no, we can't," he chokes, tears stabbing his eyes.

"We have to," she sobs, "we have to."

She's hyperventilating. Somewhere in her chest there's a gaping hole, and air is leaking out, blood is leaking out, she can't _breathe_, her heart can't _beat._

"We have to go," Sam says, finding his head. The bomb is gonna blow. It's gonna destroy them if they don't.

For a moment, Claire thinks that maybe Charlie had been right to see this world for what it is, so flawed and overflowing with hardships. For a moment, she thinks maybe she should stay.

But Sam is already dragging her out. Her feet aren't even touching the ground.

When the crisp air hits them, she realizes, in sudden disbelief, that the rest of the world – now colorless, in her eyes – is fine, the rest of the world is living in ignorance, and somewhere out there people are _happy_. _How can this be?_ she thinks, how can this monumental pain only be shared between them two?

She is calling his name.

"Sam, Sam, where is he, Sam?" and Sam wishes he knew. Wishes he could do something, wishes he could even _think_ to do something besides make another demon-deal. _No_, his brain warns,_ not again. _Not again. No more, please. It's gotta stop. It's got to. _Please_.

He braces Claire against his body because he needs _someone_ and she is trembling like a twig caught in a tornado. His arm crosses her chest like a straightjacket, and she grabs it, holds on like it's the safety bar on a rollercoaster, holds on for dear life. _There's no body, no body, nobody_, so she just latches onto him instead.

* * *

**A/N: This chapter concludes Part I of the story - there are going to be two parts total. Since we're halfway through, I would especially love to hear your feedback! Please let me know what you think, and thank you so much for reading :)**


	11. Wheel In The Sky

**A/N: Thank you so much to babeelove, toridw317, and ImpalaLove for reviewing! Even though this story doesn't have too many followers, I'm so lucky to have such consistent reviewers. You guys are seriously awesome and honestly, the lack of followers doesn't bother me that much - the SPN fandom is so vast, I never expected this to get very popular in the first place. I'm just hoping to write an entertaining story for you all!**

**Song: Wheel In The Sky by Journey**

* * *

**PART II**

. . .

**CHAPTER 11**

**Wheel In The Sky**

Immediately after Dean's 'disappearance,' they burn Bobby's flask because he's asked them to. They have nothing of Dean to burn, so the flask – which he had grown so fond of – becomes a stand-in him for him, too.

They watch the flames lick the rounded sides and the metal turn molten, shadows dancing on their expressionless faces.

Their tears have dried. All that's left is salt.

Sam sees his last family member – the last in a long line of deals, of self-sacrifice, of destruction, of death, of _fucking stupidity_, the last in the Winchester Cycle – drip into obscurity amongst the hot coals.

How could you do this to me, he thinks. How could you fucking do this to me again?

Claire sees one more lost soul in a growing trail of loved-ones that have abandoned her hissing in the fire.

I should have known this would happen, she thinks. This is always what happens.

And when there's nothing left, they turn around and leave it all behind.

. . .

_**1 YEAR LATER**_

Dean resurfaces into the world of the living in a location that, ironically, seems no different than Purgatory. In fact, the only thing that alerts him to his success is the complete and utter darkness engulfing him – never in his life has he been so grateful to be blinded by the black of night. The sun never set in Purgatory.

Still, he is in the middle of a forest in god-knows where. He is, quite literally, not out of the woods yet.

Dean's mind works twice as fast as it used to – it's more efficient, more honed, more predatory. As soon as his eyes adjust, he scans his surroundings for a millisecond, then begins moving.

In the jungle, you can never stop moving.

Not long after he starts winding expertly through the tree trunks, he stumbles upon a campsite.

He's not sure what he looks like, but he can only imagine. The closest thing he's had to a mirror in over twelve months is the rocky stream (Was it the Styx? he wondered so many times) running through that cursed place, that stream that – in the end – lead him to the porthole. It was the only part of the landscape that moved. _You're not supposed to be here_, they would say, and so he followed the river, blind, inexplicable faith propelling him. Life leads to life, after all.

In that bubbling water he saw his features change, day by day, until his face slowly disappeared under a mask of blood and dirt.

He has no patience for stealth, and his movements attract the attention of the two campers inside the tent.

They emerge and stare at him in sheer terror. He might as well be a Wendigo, or something similarly abominable.

Now I know how the monsters feel, he muses, not unhappily. How the tides have turned.

He understands that murderous spark in his brother's eyes, now, that spark that so alarmed him when they were first reunited those years ago. It wasn't sadistic, not exactly. It was something more feral, more basic.

The only difference is, Sam was in Purgatory for a matter of months. Dean was there for a year, the best he can figure it. Since the sun didn't set, he kept track of time with lines in the mud, scars in the bark. Counting minutes. Counting hours. This alone was enough to drive someone mad.

Purgatory was not Hell. Not even close. Hell turns you into a psychopath; Purgatory pushes you to the very edge of your humanity. In Hell you grow to enjoy the killing, in Purgatory you are numbed to it.

Dean does not feel as morally bankrupt as he did when he left Hell – he just doesn't feel much of anything. He _does_ wonder, though, why he was there for a full year.

"Where am I?" is all he demands of the unfortunate couple. They shine a flashlight in his eyes and his retinas ignite in pinpricks of pain.

He waves a gun at them – so long unused – when they don't immediately respond.

"Where's the road?" he grills more forcefully, his growl-like voice finally meshing seamlessly with his appearance.

"Twelve miles that way," the male camper eventually stammers.

Dean shifts his grip on the butt of the pistol, eying their supplies; if he's gonna hike twelve miles, he'll need food and water. What a foreign concept, he thinks.

Shooting them one last menacing look, he swipes an unattended backpack and takes off.

Dean reaches the road in the morning. When he does, the familiar scent of sand and tar reaches his nose, assaulting his senses.

Everything is so different here, so much more vivid. It's like someone turned the contrast up behind his eyes, like he's just now experiencing the world in HD. The smells are more pungent, the sights are sharper, the sounds are more nuanced.

A cool breeze lifts his hair, blowing fresh life into his lungs.

He didn't know what he expected to feel, but he didn't expect to feel this. He feels victorious – revitalized. He moves with more confidence, as though he is better acquainted with himself.

After Hell, he didn't know who he was… Now, he knows exactly who he is: a hunter, plain and simple. And a damn good one.

By nightfall, he's hitched a ride into town. It's Maine, and the year is 2012.

Sparing not even a moment, he springs out of his Good Samaritan's pickup truck (_Ya sure ya don't need help? A hospital? You're looking mighty banged up; I'm fine, I'm fine; Ya sure ya haven't done anything illegal?; _Dean grinned _Not today._). It's not more than a blink before he finds a payphone and inserts several quarters.

The only phone number he has memorized is Sam's, and only because he would be his first call if he ever got arrested. (And this has, in the past, occurred far too many times for his liking).

The machine rings twice, his heart palpitating wildly each time. What if he doesn't answer? What if he changed his number?

And worst of all: _What if something happened to him while I was away?_

His fears escalate no further: Sam answers the phone.

"Hello?" His tone is light, upbeat.

He waits a moment before replying, savoring the cadence of his brother's voice and letting relief lap over him like an icy drink of water on a sweltering day.

Eventually, he croaks, "Sammy?"

There is dead silence on the other end of the line – Dean almost fears the connection has been severed.

Sam's tone changes drastically. "D-Dean?"

"Yeah, Sam, it's me…"

"H-holy shit. H-h-how…?"

The payphone pips. He doesn't have any more change.

"Look, I ain't got a lot of time – where are you?"

"I-I'm in South Dakota. Where are you?"

"Friggen Maine."

"Can you get to an Internet café or something? I-I'll wire you some money, I'll send you some documents – you need to get on the soonest plane to Sioux Falls."

Dean cringes – four months in Hell and a year in Purgatory, and still airplanes scare the shit out of him. Go figure.

"Yeah, I think I can manage that," he says.

"Okay, good… How did you…?"

"I'll explain everything when I see you. We got a lot to talk about."

"…You're telling _me_."

The beeps are counting down the last seconds of the call. "The line's gonna cut out," he rushes, "How's –"

Before he can finish his sentence, the dial tone smothers his voice. He murmurs to himself, "… Claire," before hanging up.

He rests his forehead against the phone, skin sticking to the filthy metal. It smells of iron, of coins, of the millions of fingers that touched it before him. His eyes flutter closed and, for a brief second, his brows draw together.

He straightens back up and leaves the phone booth.

. . .

When Dean walks through the airport's automatic doors, Sam is leaning against the Impala, hands shoved into the pockets of his beige corduroy jacket. He looks generally unchanged – a bit thinner, maybe, and his hair is longer. It seems Sam's mop grows an inch every time he goes more than a month without seeing him. A year has given his locks an abundance of time to cultivate.

When Sam spots his brother, his stomach clenches; the first thing he notices is that he looks _so much_ _older_.

His grooming, for one, is rough and imprecise. Dean had never been wont to sport a beard, but there is a decidedly thicker layer of stubble on his face than he has ever seen. This in itself does not make him look radically different – the hairs are blondish and hard to see, but the shadow they create ages him considerably. Not to mention, it's uneven – as is his haircut, which is also decidedly shaggier –, like he's been shaving with a machete.

_And_ he's quite a bit tanner. His bronzed skin-tone makes his eyes appear lighter, sun-strained, like he'd been stranded on a tropical island.

As he treads closer, he sees hairline wrinkles around these eyes – smile lines, but not from smiling. From squinting at that dull, ever-present sun.

Dean's mouth is a terse line as the two estranged brothers absorb each other's presence.

Without warning, he tosses him a coin.

Caught off guard, Sam scrambles to catch it before it hits the ground. He does, but only just, and upon studying it observes that it's a silver dollar.

Dean dumps a bottle of Poland Springs on him while he's distracted.

Spraying the water out of his mouth and shaking his head dramatically, he gripes, "I'm not a demon, Dean! Or a shapeshifter!" and he can't help but think 'no-chick-flick-moments' Dean is back with a vengeance.

At this, his brother's mouth finally cracks into a grin and he splashes the water on himself. "Neither am I," he says.

"You don't need to prove it to me – I know it's you."

"You forgot Leviathan, by the way – there's borax in here too, Sammy," is all he says.

Sam can't help but chuckle. "They let you on the plane with that?"

"Security ain't too tight on a Maine to South Dakota flight, let me tell you," he laughs.

Sam is smiling broadly. Even after twenty-something odd years, he still has those same dimples. "How was the flight, by the way?" he teases slyly.

"Don't make me douse you with holy water again."

"I dunno whether to hug you or take a shower."

Again, Dean laughs, and makes the decision for him by yanking him into a bone-crushing embrace. "C'mere man."

They stay like this for a while, oblivious to the outside world and secure in this brief reprieve.

When they break apart, Sam admits, "I can't believe it, dude. You're friggen alive! What the hell happened?"

"Turns out, standin' too close to an exploding Dick sends your ass straight to Purgatory."

Sam ignores the innuendo. "You were in Purgatory?! How'd you get out?"

"Y'know that door you were talking about? Well, I found it."

"It took you the whole year?"

Dean nods grimly. "Let's continue this little recap in the car, shall we? I'm starvin', and those peanuts didn't do jack."

Now, Sam nods. "Okay," he agrees, as Dean caresses the hood of the Impala lovingly. His fingers skirt over the sleek black metal with a tenderness he's never seen his brother exhibit in any other capacity.

"I assume you wanna drive?"

"Hell yeah," Dean confirms. Patting the roof of the car, he coos, "Daddy missed you, Baby."

Sam rolls his eyes, but tosses him the keys nevertheless.

Once behind the wheel, the elder Winchester takes a minute to soak in the familiar beauty of his car's dashboard, before questioning, "So. Where to?"

"I've been living at Bobby's," he says, a bit sheepishly.

"_Bobby's_? He still hangin' around?"

"No," Sam says gravely. "He, um… He asked us to burn the flask, right after… Right after you disappeared."

There's a pause, during which time Dean scrubs his hand over his mouth.

"It was for the best, he said-"

"He was right."

"Yeah. And he, uh, he left us everything, y'know. He said… In the will, he said he-he wanted us to have a home."

Dean feels a twinge of pain inside his ribcage. Dad said that too, once, but he never did anything about it.

"That sentimental son of a bitch…"

"Dean…" Sam starts, "What, um, what happened to Cas? Was he with you?"

He clears his throat, fingers contracting around the steering wheel. "Yeah… Cas, uh… Cas didn't make it."

"W-whaddyou mean?"

"Somethin' happened to him down there. Things got pretty hairy towards the end, and he… just let go."

"So Cas is dead? You saw him die?"

Dean averts his focus to the upper left corner of the windshield. "I saw enough."

"So, what, you're not sure?"

"I said I saw enough, Sam," he says firmly, doing his best John Winchester impression.

"Right…" he falters, before eventually replying, "Dean, I'm sorry…"

Dean examines his fingernails, little crescents of silt still trapped beneath the nubs. "Me too… So you – you're living at Bobby's? For how long?"

"Almost the whole time," he answers. "I-right after, I went to Amelia's, but…"

"But?"

"She's, um… She's engaged."

"Oh," Dean says, suddenly feeling awkward. He waits for what he deems an appropriate duration of time, before cutting to the question he's been itching to ask: "How's Claire?"

Sam hesitates, and for one dreadful second, he fears he might have lost track of her, or worse.

He eventually stutters, "She's, uh, she's fine…"

"Where is she?" he presses pointedly.

"She's here…"

"Whaddyou mean here? In Sioux Falls?"

Sam's acting cagey about this topic, and for the life of him, Dean can't figure out why. Unless…

"At Bobby's?"

There's something indecipherable in his tone. It's not angry, but it's definitely not pleased, either. It takes Sam several beats to catch his implication.

"Oh no, Dean, God, no!" he sputters at once. He jumps out of his skin at the prospect, but can't help but note that his brother drew this conclusion a little too quickly and seemed eerily unbothered by it. "How could you even think that?! Oh my God, no, she has a place of her own in town – she's been working as a guidance counselor at a local high school."

"A frickin' guidance counselor?" he balks, quirking an eyebrow. "What, did you guys stop hunting or something?"

"You could say that…"

"Seriously?!"

"Look, I mean, you'll see – a year is a long time, Dean. A lot has changed. A _lot_. She knows you're coming – she's waiting for us at Bobby's, with Jody. But Dean, there's… There's something you should know… I didn't know how to tell you… I mean, the situation is so out-there, it's not like there's a guidebook on this shit... Maybe I shouldn't even be the one telling you in the first place, but…"

But Dean has already heard everything he needed to. _She's waiting at Bobby's._

He throws the car into gear, checking his mirrors.

And then he sees.

"What the fuck is that?" he demands, whirling around to stare at the offending item in the back seat of his car.

It's a car seat. Dark gray plastic, lined with plush orange fabric. The size made for an infant.

Sam winces, having completely forgotten this contraption was there.

"Did you have a fucking kid?" Dean goes on, a mix of panic, shock, and confusion bubbling in his throat.

He shakes his head, tendrils of brown hair falling into his eyes. "No," he says. "Not me."

* * *

**A/N: Pretty please let me know what you think! Sorry this one's a little shorter than the others. I'm having a hard time keeping them all around the same length, but hopefully you won't mind. For some weird reason I'm suuuper OCD about keeping this stuff uniform lol. **


	12. Wait

**A/N: I'm so happy you guys liked the last chapter, I was so nervous about it! Thank you so so much to rosesapphire16, Wolflihood, PadfootCc, themightypanda, and Nemu-Chan for reviewing! **

**Song: Wait by The Beatles (I hope you guys are listening to some of these songs, because they're all so good!)**

* * *

**CHAPTER 12**

**Wait**

Dean thinks, Whaddyou mean not_ you_?, but represses it, instead venturing, "You sure you didn't give birth? I heard about this one dude in Arizona-"

"_Dean_."

He's doing that thing where he rattles off horribly unfunny jokes because he doesn't know what direction the conversation is taking. Sam would recognize this knee-jerk reaction anywhere – the birds and the bees talk at the age of thirteen is what comes to mind first. (He, only nine at the time, still shudders at the memory of John Winchester's baritone rasping, _Now son, I know nature will take its course one way or another_… Young Sammy learned never to eavesdrop again.).

"You didn't do that thing, did you? Where you double-bag it? 'cause y'know, that actually-"

"No, Dean. _I'm _careful," he deadpans.

"So what then, you started dating a single mom?"

"No, can you stop talking for two seconds! This is what I've been trying to tell you."

But Dean isn't hearing much of anything anymore. He's tunneling deep inside his own head.

_Not me?_

_I'm__ careful?_

Does he mean-

He can't mean…

No.

But-

No, it's impossible-

No it's not, you moron.

His brain is not given the opportunity to continue rocketing down the trail of what-ifs and can-nots.

"_You_ do," Sam breaches his thoughts. "_You_ have a kid."

All he can manage is a half-crazed "_Huh?_"

"Yeah," the other mutters, "Yeah, I know. I think we were all surprised."

Dean can only see denial.

What the fuck.

Son of a-

"No, that's impossible," he says, and Sam gives him a look like he's that stupid fucking jock who didn't pay attention in sex-ed and knocked up the head cheerleader.

The reason he can't grasp this concept isn't because he can't understand the _logistical _dimension, but because he always felt that this was the sort of thing a person could just feel instinctively. How had he not known? How had he not sensed it? It's family it's family it's family, it's the most important thing. _How could he not know?_

"Is-is he-is she-?"

"She," Sam corrects, sorting through his brother's inability to articulate himself. He has to cut him some slack. It's a lot to take in. "I think you can do the math – she's almost four months old. Her name's Mary."

"Like-?"

"Like Mom, yeah," he finishes for him.

"And… and is she-?"

"She's beautiful," he tells him, a hint of pride in his voice. "Perfect, healthy, happy – everything you could ever hope for."

A smile flickers across Dean's face, pushing through the astonishment. He has a kid. A daughter.

_Sweet baby Jesus_.

"She's, uh, she's gonna be there? At Bobby's?"

"Yeah," Sam affirms. "She'll be there."

He considers his brother, who looks as though he just underwent electroshock therapy. "You sure you're okay to drive? I can take over, if you want."

"Yeah, I'm fine," says Dean unconvincingly.

As they begin down the road, he goes on, "Is-is she _safe_?"

Sam nods in his periphery vision. "Things have quieted down a lot. There was an issue with Kevin at the very beginning – Crowley captured him at SucroCorp, but that clever little SOB managed to escape by making some sort of demon bomb. He called me and I asked around the hunter circuit for a safe place for him to stay. This guy named Garth has a houseboat in Missouri, where Kevin is now – it's warded against literally everything you could ever think of. He's been working on translating a new tablet – the Demon Tablet."

"A houseboat in Missouri, huh? Not the first place I'd look, I'll give ya that… But what the hell is a Demon Tablet?"

"We're not sure. The translations are tough, like Claire's visions used to be, except the pain is constant so long as you read the tablet. The kid isn't in great shape."

"But Claire and-and Mary, they're all right?" It feels strange to have the latter name roll off his tongue. It's as though he's entered an Earth that is different from the one he left; one that's similar, but not the same.

"They're completely fine."

Abruptly, Dean thanks him.

Sam frowns uncomprehendingly. "For what?"

"For looking out for them," he clarifies, unable to find the exact words he's searching for. "Just… thanks."

Sam's expression softens markedly – he knows what Dean means, even if he can't communicate it. "Of course."

. . .

Sam enters Bobby's first; Claire is picking her nails nervously on the sofa, and Jody is fawning over the sleeping baby in her portable bassinet.

Upon seeing the younger Winchester, Claire leaps into a standing position.

"Is he here?" she hisses, her voice thick with a million different emotions.

Sam nods. "He's just grabbing a couple of things out of the car."

This is a lie. They all know it is. He just got back from Purgatory with nothing but the clothes on his back – what could he possibly be grabbing? No, it's very clear that he's mentally preparing himself for what he's about to walk in on.

And no one blames him.

When Dean finally reveals himself, everyone's heart is thumping so rapidly that the chorus sends a palpable tremor through the room.

For a full minute, no one utters a word. They all just gape openly.

Dean looks much different, and so does Claire.

Her face is mostly the same, but she's cut her hair. It used to be long, with a certain waviness to it, but now it falls just past her shoulders in a sleek bob. Her once-boyish figure has filled out; she had always been very lean and athletic, and true enough, her waist is still quite slim considering she gave birth less than four months ago, but her hips and chest are decidedly more ample. And instead of her favorite Daisy Dukes, she's taken to wearing a pencil skirt.

All in all, she looks much more mature in every sense of the word.

After the initial shockwaves fade, she bursts into tears. She covers her mouth with the back of her hand, as though she's embarrassed, but water rushes inevitably from her cornflower-blue eyes.

Dean drops his knapsack to the dusty floor with a resounding _thud._

Claire is already moving.

She flies into his arms and buries her face in the crook of his neck; he smells like leaves and gasoline.

He squeezes her until her feet are dangling in the air, as though he has grown unaccustomed to gentle contact.

Jody and Sam look anywhere but directly at the couple, immensely uncomfortable. This reunion doesn't seem like the type of thing that should play out in front of an audience – it's too intimate, too laden with meaning.

"_Dean,_" she murmurs repeatedly. "I can't believe it's really you."

He wants to say, _It is, don't cry_, but every attempt hitches in his throat.

So instead he drops her to her feet and kisses her passionately, knotting his hands into her hair. He can hardly remember ever feeling anything so soft. It glides between his fingers like milk.

There's a deliberate _Ahem _from Sheriff Jody Mills.

They break apart, but Claire can't stop kneading her hands into the material of his jacket, like he is a mirage that might vanish at any moment if she doesn't hold onto him.

"S-sorry," she stutters sheepishly.

"Oh, don't stop on account of me," she teases with a smirk. "Hasn't bothered ya before. I just wanted to say hi, and then – don't worry – we'll leave you two lovebirds to catch up."

Reluctantly, Claire lets go of Dean. He shoots Jody a kind (albeit a bit distracted) smile, before giving her a hug.

"Good to have you back," she sniffs, suddenly emotional.

At his, Dean's smile broadens to something more sincere. All these fractured people have somehow managed to form a ramshackle family, and in Bobby's house, no less. The man was a grouch, but he would have been pleased to see it.

"Good to be back."

When she releases him, she gives his shoulder an affectionate pat.

"Well," she scoffs, thumbing a stray tear away from the corner of her eye, "leave it to me – I always promise myself I'm not going to cry, but here come the waterworks. I know you guys have a lot to talk about – I'll leave before I start bawling."

"Yeah, we'll see you guys later," Sam says. "I'll take Jody back to her place."

"We're having dinner there," she adds. "I'm making a pot roast, so you two had better be there – it's four hours from now, so you have plenty of time to… do whatever it is you need to do. Bye bye, kids!"

And then they're gone, and Claire and Dean don't even know where to begin.

Dean is having more trouble than ever putting his thoughts into words, so instead of saying anything he just paces over to the cradle where the baby is sleeping.

He's shaking. His heart is thumping up in his esophagus, his ears are on fire.

Dean had had no preconceptions, no idea what to expect.

But…

Even if he were more poetically inclined, he still wouldn't be able to describe this experience. Nothing in his life, his brutal, grueling life, has ever approached a moment like this.

He knows this baby is just a baby, and probably looks like most others. He never really paid much attention to how babies looked, to be entirely honest. They were always just warm bundles of barf and dirty diapers, as far as he was concerned.

But something about this one is different. She's beautiful, like Sam said, and he feels instantly attached to her, like he recognizes her somehow, _like_…

Like she's his.

All his life, Dean had carefully constructed a character to embody: bad boy, good-time guy, whatever you want to call it. People like him – no, people like the person he tried to be – had a Devil May Care attitude. They drank 'til they dropped, found a girl, blew through town and did again in the next one. These were the types of men who left when the heat got too hot, who skipped out on their pregnant girlfriends and drowned their guilt in more of the same.

Newly enlightened, Dean can only think, _How could anyone ever do such a thing?_ Why would they even want to?

He feels the overwhelming urge to touch this sleeping little girl, but he's afraid he might hurt her.

She's so tiny, so fragile – he just grazes his fingertips over the bumblebee pattern of her onesie.

Her eyes pop open, as though she had only just been pretending to be asleep. They're a light, undecided bluish color, like they might choose to resemble Claire's, or maybe even his. The hair is of equally perplexing origin, made up of fine golden threads that look like they could turn either blonde or red.

"Do you want to hold her?" Claire asks, voice low. The sound jars him out of his dazed examination.

Dean opens his mouth to blurt out a string of uncertainties, but she is already digging the gurgling child out of the basinet and handing her to him. He's forced to accept her into his arms for fear of her dropping to the floor.

"She's a good baby," she goes on, as Mary wriggles excitedly. "Coming out she was a ripped – screaming like a banshee, but after that she was fine. She sleeps like a rock like the rest of you Winchesters, thank God."

Dean can't believe how light she is. After years upon years of carting around a small arsenal, she sits in his grasp like a blanket full of air.

Her minuscule hands start flailing against his chest, unruly and clumsy. She seems just as interested in him as he is in her.

"The nurses said she's got a temper, though. She gets that from you, I'm sure."

Finally locating his voice, he snorts, "Yeah, _okay_."

As though the deep, unfamiliar rumble of his chest has startled her, she begins to squirm and fuss. Claire quickly extracts her from his arms before she can start wailing, replacing her in the basinet. She tickles her belly, and the moaning ceases like magic.

"So, Mary?"

She nods, wetting her lips hesitantly. "Mary Ryan Winchester. The Ryan is for… Well, Ryan. Sam helped name her – he said we were lucky she was a girl, because otherwise there would be too many people to name her after, but he also said your family has a habit of naming kids after their grandparents, so, voilà."

_We._

"Well, I'm just gonna come out and say it," Dean starts brusquely, shrugging. "I'm surprised as all hell."

Her mouth twists into something between a smile and a grimace. "It was that night, right before… You know. Because it'd been so long since we were on the road together I'd stopped… I guess I should have told you, but it happened so fast, I wasn't thinking… I know it's not really fair, I know how you must feel, especially since you missed the whole thing, I hope you don't feel like you didn't have a-"

_Choice_.

He grabs her shoulders briskly to stop her prattling. "Whoa whoa whoa, Claire. I said _surprised_, not upset."

She lets out an audible breath of relief, her body caving into his touch.

"I'm sorry I wasn't, though – wasn't there. I should've been."

Upon hearing the frustration in his tone, her eyebrows meet in bemusement. "It's not your fault…"

"Yeah, but you must've been so scared-"

"I was," she admits, "but I was grateful. Y-you were gone, and I thought… After a few months, I thought it was for good – I was so grateful to still have a part of you, even if I never expected it. Sam and Jody – they were amazing. They helped so much. I never felt alone."

Dean sets his jaw, eyes downcast. "I'm glad," he says, and he is.

"I wasn't in the best place, after, as I'm sure you can imagine," Claire continues to confess. "Neither was Sam. I know it's such a cliché, but she was a blessing. And I know you say you don't believe in God, Dean, but I prayed for you to come back every single night for a year and here you are."

He gives her a crooked half-smile, tearing his eyes off of the floorboards. "Well, you're a prophet. Maybe he's more tuned-in to your frequency."

"Maybe," she murmurs.

"I thought of you every day too, Claire," he tells her seriously. "Every fucking day I trudged through that godforsaken forest, I thought of you on the other side of that door."

Tears are replenishing themselves in her eyes, so she fixes them on her fidgeting hands to attempt to stifle the urge. "You were in Purgatory?"

"Yeah," he confirms, explaining to her what he already told his brother.

After giving his tale a moment to resonate, she says, "We-we tried so hard to find someone to contact you – we even went to find Lydia Allen, but we couldn't track her down. We looked for a long time, but… We got worried, when I started to show… Sam didn't think we should do anything that might draw attention from Crowley. I know it's not an excuse, there's no excuse-"

"Claire, it's fine," he cuts her off. "I knew Sammy was the smart one for a reason – we definitely can't let Crowley find out about Mary."

"I know," she agrees. "That's why we've been laying low for so long."

And then something hits Dean, suddenly, like a freight train.

He is a hunter, plain and simple.

And now, he is also a father.

There is no way in hell he can be both.

* * *

**A/N: This might seem like kind of an irrelevant question, but it will help me a ton just in general - my writing style changes a little from chapter to chapter (not intentionally, that's just the way it comes out), but is there a style you guys prefer? You seemed to like the last chapter a lot - was it because of the content or the style? I tried to write this one more like the last one with shorter sentences and more descriptions of actions than feelings. And I've been adding more space between lines because I think that makes it easier to read. I think sometimes I get too caught up in the characters' heads and expressing their thoughts - what do you guys think? Do you prefer to read what's happening, what they're thinking, or both equally?**

**And lastly, please let me know what you think of the storyline! There's going to be a lot of internal conflict for Dean coming up. What are your thoughts about Daddy!Dean? I think, in the show, he seemed much different when he got back from Purgatory - what do you guys think?**


	13. Smoke On The Water

**A/N: Thank you so much to toridw317, Wolflihood, ImpalaLove, themightypanda, and rosesapphire16 for reviewing! You guys are the best! I hope you all enjoy this chapter.**

**Song: Smoke On The Water by Deep Purple**

* * *

**CHAPTER 13**

**Smoke On The Water**

One more unanticipated dilemma is added to the mountain Dean has been forced to scale these past few days. It sneaks up on him abruptly, after dinner.

It is: Does he stay with Sam, at Bobby's, or does he stay with Claire, at a strange new apartment?

The choice should be incredibly simple, but the shrinking, pre-Hell part of him wants, perhaps childishly, to pretend this world is the same one he was born into, wants to stay at Bobby's, in the bed he slept in as a kid, with his little brother in the next room.

Dean suffocates this part.

Things are not the same – they haven't been for a long time, and now they definitely never will be.

He can't imagine _Look out for your little brother, boy_ was meant to be forever – he can't worry about his thirty-year-old brother when he has an infant daughter.

But it's hard to ignore something that has become part of the very fabric of your being.

Claire's apartment is around the same size as the one he saw those many years ago (small), but it is more residential and in a far better location – it's not an apartment so much as it is a duplex, and there are two bedrooms.

As she unlocks the front door, Dean eyes the one directly beside it warily.

Claire had tried never to contemplate what type of father Dean would be, if only for her own sanity. Since he wasn't coming back, thinking about it would only pour salt into the wound and drive her deeper into the depths of anguish that she had spent months trying to crawl out of.

But when her self-restraint slipped, she imagined he'd be rabidly protective.

She was certainly not wrong.

"The woman who lives next door is seventy-three," she tells him with a smirk. "Her name is Bertha. She watches Mary for me when I'm at work."

Dean holds the door open for her as she carries the car seat through the threshold and stares at his daughter – whom he has known for less than a day – as though she is far too precious to be left in the hands of a stranger.

"You're already working? Aren't they supposed to give you time off or somethin'?"

"They did – I just started back a few weeks ago."

He makes an incredulous face. "But she's only like, what, sixteen weeks old?"

Claire only shrugs. "Bertha has nine grandchildren – she knows what she's doing."

"You like working there? At the school?" he asks delicately.

"It's fine. Some of the kids are assholes, some are sweet – same as when we went. Even if I can only help one kid, it's worth it, y'know? And it pays the bills."

"If you're worried about money-"

She cuts him off with a snicker. "I've been living in the real world again, Dean. Can't get health insurance from credit card scams. Plus, now you're here, and _you_ don't have a job, so you can watch her if you're so suspicious of Bertha."

"That woman could be a demon for all you know, Claire," he insists sternly. "We gotta be careful."

"You don't think I tested her? I had her over for a nice steaming cup of holy water tea the very first day we moved in – she's clean. I said I was living in the real world, but I'm not an idiot."

Dean seems somewhat placated, and takes in their surroundings; the apartment looks to be newly renovated and the furniture is minimalist, but immaculate apart from a variety of baby paraphernalia strewn about. He knows Claire, and he knows she's no neat-freak – she must have straightened up on his account.

Four days ago, he was drenched in blood, fighting his way out of Purgatory. Now he's coming back from a quasi-family dinner and discussing babysitters and day-jobs.

_What the hell happened?_

The thought of Claire going to a mind-numbing job she hates every day to put food on the table makes his stomach churn. She shouldn't have to worry about this, he thinks – he should be the one worrying about it.

"Claire, if you don't like the job-"

"I said it's fine, Dean. I don't mind it. What would you have me do all day, stay at home and batten down the hatches while you run a pyramid scheme out of the living room? I want Mary to have a normal life – don't you?"

This strikes him to the core.

"Yes, yes, of course," he relents. She can't be raised like he was. She can't.

"Everyone is pretty happy the way things are," she tells him. "Sam has been working as a paralegal, and he still checks in with Kevin every week and sometimes takes minor hunting cases on the weekends. Jody is still the sheriff. This whole 'normal life' thing has been working out pretty well, surprisingly."

"I'll get a job. I'll deal with the whole money issue – I don't like the idea of anyone but family watching her," he declares, suddenly very opinionated about something he has no experience in.

Claire rolls her eyes. "This isn't the 1950s, Dean. Plus, I hate to break it to you hon, but you're a high school dropout – your starting salary isn't gonna be stellar. I'm going to have to work anyway, especially since I'd eventually like to get a regular house."

In all his life, Dean has never regretted his lack of education until now.

He grows quiet, fixing his eyes again on the slumbering baby. She has huge, adorable jowls, like Sam used to have (and, though he has no way of knowing for sure, like he probably had, too).

He feels Claire's hand on his arm.

"I'm sorry," she atones. "I didn't mean –"

"No, it's fine," he says. "You're right."

She examines his features, which suddenly seem so much less boyish than she remembers. The juvenile cockiness and bravado are gone, replaced by a sturdy confidence.

"Wanna put her to bed?" she asks softly, gesturing to Mary. "Her crib is just in the other room."

The aforementioned confidence in Dean's eyes transmutes to a bright, glimmering doubt. "I-What if she wakes up?"

"Like I said," she assures him, "she sleeps like a rock. And if she wakes up, just try walking around with her for a little bit. She likes that. I'm gonna go get ready for bed."

Claire leaves him alone with this alien creature, and he feels more frightened now than he did when a dozen vampires surrounded him just last week.

What if I do something wrong? he can't help but think. What if I screw things up?

The imprudent, pre-Hell part of him figures, _Eh, what the hell. How hard can it be?_

It's odd he thinks, after having endured so much, to be flummoxed by something so ordinary. The majority of the human population reproduces at some point, after all – but the majority of the human population doesn't do a stint in Hell and a tour in Purgatory.

What's even more odd is that here he is, in a home with the woman he loves and their child – three things had resigned himself to never having very early on in his life.

Fate is a tricky little fucker.

He scoops Mary out of the carrier, and she doesn't stir. So far so good.

Like he is walking on eggshells, he carefully treads into the room Claire indicated.

Everything inside is a gender-neutral shade of green. He remembers this being Claire's favorite color.

After the first few steps into the room, she shifts and lets out a little squeak. Dean's entire body freezes, from head to toe. Her fussing doesn't get any further than this, though, and he is able to set her down in the crib without incident.

Peering through his eyelashes at her, he can't help but wonder how many people have done this before him, and feels a sudden pang of envy surge through him. Too many, surely.

But he's here now. And he's gonna make that mean something.

Later, when he makes his way into Claire's (and, ostensibly, _his_) bedroom, he sees her sitting on the mattress with her knees drawn against her chest, very much awake.

She's clad in a short, silk nightgown, which her bust is nearly spilling out of. Her hair, which had previously been secured atop her head, falls around her face, the sleekness having given way to a gentle curling at the ends.

Dean gulps, not quite sure what her intentions are. Maybe this is just how she sleeps nowadays (though, he remembers all too well her plethora of shapeless, plaid flannel pajama bottoms – it was always a rare delight to see her in a pair of barely-there shorts or a skimpy nightie, like that one time… If this night proceeds like that one did, he's gonna have to be damn careful not to conceive anymore kids).

She cocks her head at him as he stands paralyzed in the doorway.

"What's the matter?" she purrs.

"Uh… Nothing. Never mind."

"C'mere," she beckons, reaching out towards him.

He cautiously shuffles over to the edge of the bed.

She shifts over to where he is, rearing up on her knees so they're roughly the same height, fists her hands into his cotton shirt, and wrenches him into a heated kiss.

Usually, he is the one to initiate these sorts of things – her aggressiveness catches him off guard.

"Um Claire 're you sure thisis okay?" he mumbles hurriedly against her lips.

"Absolutely sure," she whispers, her warm breath tickling his ear.

She starts undressing him as she might a doll, pulling his shirt over his head with a sort of tunnel-visioned detachment. She's apparently on a mission.

Dean just submits to her advances – this time, he's more comfortable if she takes the reins.

"A year is a _long_ time, Dean," she tells him, a slight whine pinching her voice.

Doesn't he know it. His time in Purgatory sheltered him from physical yearnings such as hunger, thirst, fatigue, _etc_., but when he returned he was pummeled with the full force of a year's build-up.

"Mm, is it?" he teases, green eyes hooded. His hands rest lightly on her hips, fingers splayed and testing. The curves of her body are a lot more exaggerated than they once were, and he is looking forward to exploring this new terrain.

"Yes," she murmurs with an alluring smile.

She tears her gaze away from his face, instead choosing to appraise his well-sculpted torso. At least all that constant fighting had _one_ pleasant ramification. She traces her fingers over his tattoo, before hooking them through his belt loops.

Dean kicks himself mentally for even _contemplating_ not staying with Claire tonight.

. . .

Dean awakes to the smell of coffee and bacon at nine AM on Sunday morning.

Claire had awoken at six to the baby's shrieking – she sleeps through the night, but wakes up at the crack of dawn. It's a good thing Claire was already accustomed to waking up early before she had her.

Groggily, Dean lumbers into the kitchen. The sight is so preposterously domestic he half-suspects he's trapped under another jinn's spell: Claire is cooking, and Mary is lying on her stomach in her playpen, clutching a plastic mirror and making babbling noises.

"Sam called looking for you about a half-hour ago," Claire tells him cheerily. "We really need to get you a cell phone of your own."

Rubbing his eyes with the heel of his palm, he asks, "What'd he want?"

"He didn't say. He asked me to have you call him back – my phone's over there." She points to the coffee table next to the playpen with her spatula.

He continues to drag his feet lazily into the living room, studying Mary all the way. He's having a hard time getting over how cute she is – Dean was never one to pay much attention to such frivolous things, and his appreciation of aesthetics was mostly limited hot chicks. Still, he thinks this reaction is fairly normal, and he's grateful for it.

His grogginess must be interfering with his inhibitions, because he grabs Claire's cell phone _and _the baby before plopping on the sofa.

Mary squeals gleefully as he cradles her on his lap in the crook of his elbow, using one hand to occupy her tiny, ever-grasping fingers and the other to dial Sam.

Upon going through Claire's call history to find his number, he is mildly surprised to see how often his brother's name appears in the log – really, it's mostly the same three people: Sam, Jody, and Bertha.

Claire, surprised for an entirely different reason, watches Dean interact with his child in unreserved fascination. Mary seems perfectly content, and she can't help but be vaguely disturbed by how easily she has warmed up to someone who is, essentially, a stranger. It makes her think she would be ridiculously easy to kidnap.

"Sam?" comes Dean's voice.

"Hey, dude, how's it going?"

"Fine – Claire said you called lookin' for me."

"Yeah…" There's a brief pause, before he continues, "So, I usually talk to Kevin at least once a week, right? Well, this week he says he's made some progress on the Demon Tablet… Something about trials – anyway, I'm gonna take a couple of days off work and go down there, because he seems to think it's real important. Whaddyou say, you wanna join?"

Dean hesitates, looking at Claire, and then at the baby in his arms. "I, uh, I dunno, man. I just got back…"

"Oh right, right, of course!" Sam says quickly, as though he's just realized he made some gross error. "I just – uh – I just wanted to let you know that I was going. I totally get it. Take care, man."

"Yeah, you too."

Dean sets the phone back on the table. He then sinks back into the couch, holding Mary in an upright position as she attempts to violate his face with her grubby little hands.

"What'd Sam want?" Claire asks from across the room.

"Nothin'. Just somethin' about Kevin."

"Is everything okay?"

"Yeah, he said Kevin thinks he's made a breakthrough on the tablet – he's going down to Missouri to check it out."

"Did he invite you to go with him?"

"Yeah, but I told him I just got back. It doesn't seem like the sorta thing he needs backup for."

Claire's back is to him as she fiddles with the stove, so he can't see her bite her lip pensively.

"Maybe you should go with him," she suggests after a long moment.

"What?" He would have expected her to be completely averse to the notion.

"Yeah, I mean, just in case…"

But Claire has another reason altogether for encouraging this. The way she sees it, Dean has been engaged in non-stop combat for 300-something days straight. The adjustment from that to becoming Father of the Year is massive – he needs to ease into it. He can't just cut the brakes so abruptly like this – who knows what could happen.

Sam tried it, and look at how that turned out.

Granted, Dean's situation is not as dire, but she would be insanely naïve to hope that Purgatory didn't have any residual effect on him. Indeed, his mannerisms seem enormously different, more serious, more calculated – that _must_ indicate an altered state of mind.

"It might be good for you to reconnect, catch up – you'll have the plenty of time to be alone with me and Mary when you come back. Who knows, maybe Sam's not ready to lose his brother to the apple pie life just yet."

This seems to resonate with him.

"Okay," he says uncertainly. "If you're okay with it, I guess…"

* * *

**A/N: You didn't think it would be that easy, did you? **

**So, the way I see Dean in this sort of situation is this: I'd imagine he has a lot of preconceived notions of what a 'perfect' family should be, and I think it would be starkly different from what his family life was like. The trouble is, what he has envisioned may not be a) what he actually wants b) possible or c) the right thing. And I feel like he would have a difficult time balancing this.**

**And for those of you who have seen S8, I feel like pre-Purgatory Dean was often mistaken for a petty criminal, whereas post-Purgatory Dean is actually mistaken for a cop - I think this was an enormously important shift in the character's portrayal. He goes from flippant and cavalier to very serious and motivated. Not that he wasn't _motivated _before, per se, but there's a sort of goofiness that withers away (for the most part - he still has his moments). So, if ever Dean was ready to step up to the plate and deal with something like this situation, I think it would be at this point in the show's storyline.**

**Sorry this is so long! I need to stop trying to psychoanalyze everything. Anyway, please let me know what you thought of the chapter! :)**


	14. The Wind Cries Mary

**A/N: Thank you so much to ImpalaLove and toridw317 for reviewing the last chapter! I hope you all like this one :)**

**Song: The Wind Cries Mary by Jimi Hendrix (usually the songs are just vaguely related to the tone of the chapter, but this one is legit too perf)**

* * *

**CHAPTER 14**

**The Wind Cries Mary**

It's only an hour or so after Dean calls Sam that the younger of the two appears at the apartment.

Sam expertly parks the Impala out front; although this has been his car in the interim, he knows (even if they haven't discussed it) he's in the market for a new one – Dean without the Impala isn't really Dean at all.

He has a copy of the key to her apartment, just in case.

"Hi Claire," he greets upon entering the home after one knock. "Hey man," he nods to his brother. Dean nods back, but seems somewhat bemused by the fact that Sam could just walk in.

He makes a beeline for Mary's playpen, where she's now lying on her back playing with a planetary mobile. He waves at her for a moment, before reaching in fearlessly and extracting her from the plush enclosure.

Again, Dean watches in puzzlement as his little brother holds her in his mammoth hands without even a hint of the reservations he himself exhibited – Sam is perfectly at ease handling her. Borderline careless, if you ask him.

He swings her around freely, a wide, dimpled grin lighting up his face – a mark of the type of abandoned joy he hasn't seen him display since they were kids. She screeches in delight, arms and legs thrashing in a sort of inept swimming motion. He presses a noisy kiss to one of her chubby cheeks before replacing her in the playpen.

Dean also observes Claire watch this scene with an unknowing smile of her own tugging at her lips.

Something strange and foreign takes root in the pit of his stomach.

He recognizes it abstractly as an incongruous hybrid of jealousy and satisfaction. On one hand, he is immensely pleased that his brother has been such a stable help to his family.

But on the other, something even more foreign is nagging that it's _his _family, not Sam's.

How can this be? Sam is his family, utterly and completely. He is the human embodiment of this very word, in Dean's mind, and always has been. And now, they're all his family, interacting together in flawless harmony. Why should he feel anything but happiness? Why should he feel excluded?

He shouldn't. Whatever he is feeling, it's wrong.

"You ready to go?" Sam asks, eyeing his brother with vague concern.

"Yeah," Dean replies absently.

"Sorry for stealing him," the other Winchester tells Claire with a wink.

She allows him a tepid smile.

She doesn't want Dean to go. She really doesn't. There has already been an entire year between them, and she doesn't want to ever spend another second apart if she doesn't have to. But having a kid teaches you to see the big picture – she needs Dean in it for the long haul, and if that means a few more days of separation, so be it.

That's why it was she who suggested Sam ask his brother to join him in the first place.

Sam agreed – he agreed that it was up to them to take care of his brother, ideally without him even realizing it. He also agreed that quitting hunting cold turkey was probably not the best method of coping – if it didn't work for him, it most certainly wouldn't work for his brother.

After Dean's disappearance, Sam often marveled at how Claire and Dean could have fought so frequently. Without him around, he was able to forge a friendship with her independent of his brother – shared grief is a surprisingly strong bonding agent. Especially after his niece was born, they spent an inordinate amount of time together, and never argued about a thing. They were of one mind, it seemed.

Though, he supposes this would explain precisely why she fought so often with Dean – for the same reason he did.

"Stay safe, you two," Claire warns.

"We always do," Dean quips, slinging her a crooked, facetious smirk. She glares at him pointedly.

"Too soon?"

"_Way_ too soon."

"Sorry babe," he says, hoisting his duffle over his shoulder and planting a chaste kiss on her cheek. On his way towards the door, he ghosts his fingers over the fine, wispy strands of hair sprouting out of Mary's head.

Once they're out the door, Claire lets her carefree façade crumble and slumps against the counter.

. . .

The dock in Missouri reeks of gasoline and rotting fish, and there are tiers of sound. The base tier is the light crashing of waves, the creaking of ropes, and the scraping of barnacles against wood; the next is the low hum of engines and foghorns in the distance; last, is the shrill squawking of seagulls.

The boat Sam leads Dean to is two-toned, blue and white, and frosted in copper rust. The back reads 'Fizzles' Folly' in algae-tinged lettering.

Sam knocks thrice staccato on the thick metal door, and then twice slower and more forcefully.

"Secret knock," he explains over his shoulder, as though they're entering a tree-house and not a demon-proof panic room.

Chains clank from within, presumably from Kevin unlocking the door. After a minute, the prophet emerges.

His long, floppy hair has been shorn away, possibly so he can read unobstructed, and he looks worse than ever. The bones in his face are more pronounced and there is a thin layer of stubble on his chin, aging him drastically, though he has the same heavy bags under his eyes and the same sallow coloration.

"Hi guys," he says. His voice has lost its stuttering edge, and sounds far more self-assured.

Upon stepping inside, Dean notices loads of iconographic graffiti lining every wall and window. Sam hadn't been kidding when he'd said the houseboat was warded against everything you could think of.

The room they're standing in is cluttered with both Kevin's belongings and a mass of putrefying odds and ends that seem to predate his residence here. It's filthy, with grime clinging to every surface that isn't being obscured by spray paint, and stinks of low tide mingled with grease. The air in the room is crowded with this stench and the dampness of the river, and, when they breathe, their lungs feel clogged.

"Hi Kevin," Sam says. "What's up?"

"I've made a breakthrough in the tablet," he answers quickly. "There's a way to close the Gates of Hell. Forever. The whole nine yards – lock all the demons out, get them all off the face of the earth, trap 'em in Hell. I thought that could be important enough to merit a visit – I didn't wanna tell you the Hell part over the phone – you never know who might be listening…"

Kevin has grown almost cripplingly paranoid, but not without reason. Now, he feels fully immersed in his destiny.

Dean cracks a grin, and he and Sam share an astounded glance. "You sly son of a bitch…"

He turns his attention to the elder Winchester, beaming. For a fleeting instant, he looks less sickly. "What the hell happened to you, by the way?"

"Purgatory," is all he says in reply.

"So, what do we have to do?" Sam questions frantically.

"I haven't really gotten that far yet," admits Kevin. "Something about trials, like I said on the phone. Far as I can tell, there are three. The first one is something about killing a hellhound, but I dunno what the other two are yet."

Again, Dean catches Sam's eye. "This is heavy stuff, kid," he says. "Are you sure you're reading it right?"

"Oh, I'm sure," he states. "These trials… they're not supposed to be easy."

"But it can be done?"

"If we're gonna trust the Word of God, yeah, it can be done."

Sam lets out a low whistle.

"I thought you guys would wanna know," the teenager continues.

"Oh, we wanna know," Dean guarantees.

"Okay, so," Sam starts, rubbing his palms together, "here's what we do: you keep the intel coming, and Dean and I will deal with the rest. Once we know more about how to kill a hellhound, we'll start looking for people who might be having a demon-deal come due pretty soon. You stay here, you stay safe. This is a bombshell, and we can't have anyone knowing about it. If this gets back to Crowley…"

"Oh, you don't gotta tell me," Kevin assures him. "My lips are sealed."

"Not even your mom, Kev."

"I know," he agrees solemnly. "Let's just get these bastards the hell out of here so I can have my life back, alright?"

"Yeah," Sam concurs, a spike of sympathy pricking his heartstrings. "Let's do it."

. . .

The drive back to South Dakota is long and littered with uncomfortable silences. What they've just learned… These trials almost definitely aren't going to be quick little errands – they're very likely going to be more of the Herculean variety, and neither of the Winchesters knows if they're quite ready for that.

Dean asks, "You think there's any chance this is legit?"

"I don't know," Sam answers honestly. "But the tablet taught Kevin how to escape from Crowley the first time, so I'd wager it's more than just a pipe-dream."

"You ready to do this, though? Go all-in again?"

"Are _you_?" he counters, staring pointedly at his profile.

Dean's jaw tightens. "The way I figure it, if there's even a _chance _we can stuff Crowley and all his demonic butt-buddies back into Hell for good, we gotta take it. And yeah, I know I just got back, and yeah, I know I got a family to take care of now. But as far as I can see, this is exactly that – this is the best thing I could ever do for them. If I can make this world demon-free for my little girl, I've got to. No question."

Sam nods wordlessly in comprehension.

"After all those fuckers have done to hurt our family," he goes on, "I gotta make sure they can't hurt them anymore."

And Sam knows, in the end, he's right. The only thing is, while they have more to gain than they usually do, they also have a lot more to lose.

"While we're doing this," he hazards, "we're gonna need to get Claire and Mary somewhere safe – we're the ones on the offensive this time, we're the ones stirring the pot. No matter how careful we are, getting back in the ring is gonna draw Crowley's attention, and eventually he'll put two and two together – he may not know about Mary, but he does know about Claire."

"I know."

"It's really gonna disrupt everything," he warns. "We have to be sure this is the right thing – Crowley's left us alone so far."

"I know," he repeats. "But what's a few months of chaos to pay for a lifetime of safety? Better to do it now, before Mary's old enough to realize how fucked-up this world is."

. . .

"What to you mean _'trials'_?" Claire asks, quirking a skeptical eyebrow. "Like, Law and Order?"

"More like Greek mythology," Sam corrects.

"If we do this, Claire," Dean begins adamantly, "it'll close the Gates of Hell – for good. There won't be any demons anymore. Can you imagine how much safer it'll make the world? How much safer it'll make it for Mary?"

She chews her lip, clearly torn. She sees his point. She does. But why poke the bull if you don't have to?

"You're telling me this because I'm going to have to uproot my life and hole up in some safehouse if you do it, right? That's what this is about?"

Dean's mouth twitches into a slight wince, confirming her suspicions.

"I know it's not ideal," he says. "But can you imagine? _No more demons_. Ever. These things killed my mom, Claire, my dad – they killed Bobby's wife, they killed Sam once, hell, they even killed me once. Nothing has screwed up our lives more than these hell-bitches."

"Except arguably angels," Sam interjects tentatively, "but you get the picture."

"I know," she concedes, "but what if – what if you can't do it, what if Crowley gets to us before you can?"

"You gotta trust us," Dean says passionately. "I'll die before I let Crowley get to you."

"That's exactly what I'm afraid of!"

Dean sucks his teeth, changing tact. "Look," he says. "When the two of us get together, more often than not we get the job done. We've cut it damn close a few times, but we've always managed to do what needs to be done."

"You've cut it more than just close," she says, tone low and grave. "Every time something like this happens, one of you dies."

Sam gives Dean his puppy-dog stare, knowing she has a point. Claire watches him too, waiting with bated breath for his reply, waiting for him to tell her she's wrong, waiting for him to say something to make things right, to make this pain in her chest go away. It's a crushing pressure, seeing both of them look at him like this, like he has the answers.

"It won't be like that this time," he manages eventually, throwing together a tone that he hopes sounds reassuring. "We'll be careful – we'll play things differently than we have in the past. All those times, with everyone dying, there was nothing to live for – I couldn't see any light at the end of those goddamn tunnels, not with Azazel, not with Lucifer. Even with Dick, I was okay with sacrificing myself for the greater-good if it came to it. Now, I know that's not an option. Now, the light is all I see. We'll get through this. We'll get through this, and then it'll all finally be over."

* * *

**A/N: Sorry that was so expository and shorter than usual! It will pick up again soon, I promise!**

**Oh, and ImpalaLove, since you said you don't mind my amateur psychology, I just wanted to reassure everyone that this is NOT not not going to be a love triangle even in the slightest. I think Dean has always had abandonment issues when it comes to his family, from Sam wanting to leave the family business as soon as he was able to (and, by proxy, leave _him_) to feeling like he relied on Sam and their dad way more than they relied on him. So, I think that if his brother sort of stepped up to be there for his family in his absence (which, I think, Sam would definitely do), he would feel some kind of way about it, and I think it would play into these existing and underlying insecurities.**

**I tried to get to the quick of some of the characters' mindsets in this chapter, through dialogue and elsewhere. Hopefully that came through a bit.**

**Also, this was initially supposed to be 20 chapters (10 in part 1, 10 in part 2 to feed my freakish OCD), but I think it'll probably end up being longer than that.**

**Sorry for another massive A/N! Pretty please let me know what you think!**


	15. My Generation: Part 1

**A/N: Thank you so so much to ImpalaLove, themightypanda, and cheer11lindsay for reviewing the last chapter! Sorry I took longer than usual to get this one up, I've been all over the place lately. This was supposed to be one chapter so I could stick with my 20-chapter blueprint, but it became way too long so I decided to divide it. I hope you guys enjoy it!**

**Song: My Generation by The Who**

* * *

**CHAPTER 15**

**My Generation: Part 1**

_**2 MONTHS LATER**_

On the phone in Bobby's living room, Dean barks, "I'd like to know how to gank these bitches before my kid starts college, Kevin."

"I know, I know," comes Kevin's harried response, humming sharply through the earpiece. "Look, I'm working on it, but you've gotta remember it took me a whole year to even figure out that there was such a thing as these trials in the first place."

"Yeah, yeah. Just keep hacking away at it," he says, unaware of how canny this description is regarding how the tablet was first acquired. "It's bound to crack." To punctuate his assertion, he hangs up abruptly.

"Still nothing?" Sam inquires, lifting an eyebrow.

"Nada," his brother confirms.

All of a sudden, Dean's phone recommences buzzing.

"What now?"

"Um, Dean?"

His features automatically relax at the sound of soft, feminine voice that is decidedly _not_ Kevin's. "Claire? What's up?"

"Uh, you guys need to get here ASAP."

Just as quickly, Dean's brows join in a stony frown. "Are you okay? Is everything all right? I'll be there in a minute –"

He's already halfway out the door and towing Sam, who's equally alarmed and mouthing 'what,' along by the sleeve when she replies, "Everything is fine. But… um… there's a guy here who… who, uh, fell out of Mary's closet and says he's looking for John Winchester."

Dean freezes in his tracks, utterly confused. "…the fuck?"

"Yeah, I know. Just… just get over here, will you?"

"Take Mary and lock yourselves in the panic room until I get there," he instructs sternly.

"Relax – he seems just as confused as I am. He just keeps asking to see John Winchester, but he won't tell me why. Plus, the panic room is Mary's room, which is literally where he came out from."

He sucks a breath between his teeth in audible dissatisfaction but says, "We're on our way."

. . .

Dean wastes no time in pinning this strange intruder against the hallway wall hard enough to rattle the very foundations of the building. Claire is struck with the minor concern that he's going to snap the man in half like a twig – he's boyish, dark-haired, and gawky, stammering exclamations of discontent.

"Really, sir, there's no need for violence!" he protests as Dean rams his forearm into his Adam's apple. "You should be ashamed, displaying such wanton brutality in front of the lady and her child." He casts Claire an apologetic look, and she is almost inclined to feel sorry for him.

"Don't you dare talk to me about them – a grown-ass man popping out of my daughter's nursery and you wanna tell me not to get violent? Who are you? Why the hell are you looking for John Winchester?" Dean interrogates.

"Do you know him?" An indiscernible sort of hope illuminates his face.

"Answer the question!"

"I must insist, it won't make any sense to you…" he maintains articulately, cheeks flushed to the tips of his ears. "Violence is not necessary, I assure you, you alpha-male-"

"Try us," Sam orders, cutting him off before he can incite Dean's full wrath and get himself killed. While he is not directly involved in the assault, he does seem supportive of his brother's mode of action.

The man exhales as deeply as he can in Dean's vice-grip.

"My name is Henry Winchester," he explains. "John is my son. Now please, if you cannot tell me where to find him, you must release me – you have already detained me for far too long, and I haven't any time to waste!"

For a millisecond, Sam and Dean share an identical look of wild, stricken astonishment.

"Bullshit," snaps Dean, refashioning his poker-face with commendable speed.

"This is impossible," the alleged Henry Winchester mutters, lost in his mania. "Something is terribly awry…"

"I'll say!" Claire bursts out, clutching a bawling Mary to her chest. "You fell out of our closet!"

"And I do apologize, ma'am," he says earnestly, "but for whatever reason, this has all been some gross, marvelous misunderstanding. I _must_ find John Winchester at once!"

"Well, you ain't gonna find him," replies Dean, unhanding him.

At the acknowledgment that they do indeed know who John Winchester is, he perks up once more and straightens the lapels of his indigo linen suit. "So you _do_ know him."

"Yeah, he's our dad," Sam states. "And he's dead."

Henry looks immediately crestfallen and runs a hand over his once-well-coifed hair, smoothing out the slick locks. "No, no, no," he chants. "So _you_," he points at Dean, putting two and two together, before whirling to point at Mary, "…and _she's_… Oh my God. What year is it?"

"... 2013," Claire supplies. "Why?"

"Sweet Jesus…"

"What?" Dean demands harshly.

"You – you're my grandsons? And she – she's your daughter? My great-granddaughter? The spell… It must have brought me to the youngest of the bloodline…"

Sam purses his lips. "Are you saying… Are you saying you're John Winchester's _father_?"

"Indeed I am… Alright, all of you, we _must_ leave – something very dangerous is following me out of that closet."

"What?!" they all say in unison.

"Please, you must trust me."

Dean doesn't trust him as far as he can throw him, but if there's even the slightest chance they're in danger, he's gonna book it.

"Okay, go go go," he says, throwing some essentials in a duffle and ushering everyone out the door and into the Impala.

When they're all loaded into the car, a burst of yellow light explodes from within the apartment, and the ground shakes.

"Shit. Gotta go!"

Tires spark against asphalt and, after strapping Mary into her car seat, Claire peers over her shoulder out the rear window to see a pretty, redheaded woman covered in blood standing idly in the doorway to their home. Her dress has splotches of red painted all over the front, and she looks a bit like a scene from a 1950s version of Carrie.

Speeding to Bobby's, Sam shouts over Mary's wailing, "What the _hell_ is coming out after you?! And where the hell did you even come from in the first place?!"

"How much… How much do you know about your father's work?" he asks, massaging his temples.

"Everything," Sam answers impatiently. "Now answer the goddamn question."

"There's a demon coming through that porthole from Normal, Illinois, 1958. A very powerful one. Her name is Abaddon."

"Awesome. A friggen demon coming from the 50s in Normal. It must be Tuesday," Dean grumbles.

Henry is experiencing the beginnings of an incapacitating migraine. Sitting next to her car seat in the back, he sweeps a hand over Mary's scalp soothingly and whistles some sort of tune in an attempt to calm her down.

"What is that?" Sam asks abruptly, after she grows quiet.

"What is what?"

"That song," he clarifies, "I know it."

Henry smiles nostalgically to himself. "It's As Time Goes By," he says. "From Casablanca. It always used to help John fall asleep..."

"Dad used to whistle that, that's why you know it…" Dean says gravely. Beating down an unexpected wave of sorrow, he presses onwards, "Who the hell is Abbadon?"

"She's a Knight of Hell," he says. "The last of a special order of demons hand-picked by Lucifer himself. She must be stopped."

"Why the hell did you lead her here?!" he grits out.

"I… The Men of Letters were compromised – I thought that if I found John as an adult, I could find the new order…"

"The Men of what?" Sam questions.

"The Men of Letters – you said you knew your father's work."

"Yeah, our father was a hunter. We're hunters."

Henry scrubs at his face, appalled. "No, no, no, that's all wrong – you're… you're _hunters_? Really? But… but hunters are… hunters are apes! This can't be – you two are legacies!"

"Yeah, I dunno what the hell you're talking about," Dean says, parking the car in the scrap-yard. "But you'd better watch it."

Upon exiting the Chevy, Henry doubles over the rusting skeleton of an Oldsmobile and promptly vomits into the dandelions growing around it.

The others cringe.

"Are you all right?" Sam tries, noticeably more empathetic.

He laughs mirthlessly. "I've just found out my only child is dead and that he raised his sons to be _hunters_, of all things, and that the order I dedicated my entire life to is now irreparably defunct. No, I am not all right."

"These Men of Letters," Sam asks, "how d'you know they're defunct?"

"Because they were decimated during my lifetime and, evidently, John was never taught their ways, they must have ended with me… Tell me, what has your father said about me?"

Dean's expression grows deadly. "He said you left him high and dry when he was still in grade school," he says, tone even but dangerous.

Henry appears to be in agonizing pain. "I see… that must mean… that must mean I don't leave this era."

Later, inside Bobby's, Dean is preparing something of a bomb shelter.

"Any trouble at all, you go straight to the basement," he tells Claire. "Don't worry about us."

"Okay," she allows, shifting Mary – who is now, at six months, considerably larger – on her hip. Seeing that her back is starting to bother her, Dean takes the little girl and holds her easily with one arm. She locks her hand instinctively around his collar.

"They're not kiddin' when they say these things grow like weeds," he comments objectively, turning on his heel to rejoin Sam and their apparent grandfather.

Henry watches him like a hawk from the sofa, something between longing and approval shimmering in eyes that are startlingly similar to Sam's.

"How you doin'?" Dean grunts, not sounding at all like he cares what the answer is going to be.

"I'll be all right," he sighs, gaze fixed on is folded hands. "The silver-lining in this is that I get to meet my descendants, I suppose." He makes eye contact briefly and gives him a feeble smile.

Dean does not reciprocate.

"Yeah, well, whaddyou say we figure out how to clean up your goddamn mess."

"Yes," he murmurs pensively, "Abaddon must be stopped."

"As you can see, this isn't a great time for a family reunion for us," Sam pipes in from Bobby's desk.

"Yes, I'm terribly sorry," he says, staring purposefully at the baby. "She is a beautiful child," he starts. "May I ask her name? In fact, may I ask all your names?"

"I'm Dean, this is Mary, that's Sam, and that's Claire."

"You're all hunters? Even now?"

"On and off. More or less off at the moment," Sam explains, leafing through John's ratty journal. "Dean, I don't see anything in here about a Knight of Hell."

Dean clicks his tongue in agitation. "How in the name of all that is holy did you even get here, Gramps?" he demands.

"It was a simple blood sigil," he says, as though time traveling is common-knowledge, like how to boil pasta.

Dean gives Mary a little bounce, readjusting his grip on her, before raising his golden eyebrows in an expectant, no-nonsense look.

"Blood leads to blood," he forces himself to go on, "…or their next of kin."

"But Abaddon came through it also, right?" Sam decodes. "So can you create this blood sigil again and stuff her back through it?"

Henry's eyes search Bobby's tattered rug. "I would need the proper ingredients," he says, "and my soul needs time to recharge… But yes, it's possible."

"You tapped into the power of your _soul _to get here?" asks Sam. "I thought only angels could do that?"

The eldest Winchester shoots him a puzzled stare. "You don't know this?"

"Not Men in Black, or whatever," Dean says dismissively. "The point is, though, you can do it?"

"Yes, I should be able to."

There's a hush in the group, broken only by Mary's occasional cooing as Dean paces the room with her.

"What are the Men of Letters?" Sam asks eventually, curiosity overtaking him.

"We are preceptors," Henry murmurs. "Beholders, chroniclers of all which man does not understand. We share our findings with a select few trusted hunters – the very elite. They do the rest. You and your brother and your father – you should have been amongst our ranks, as my father was, and his father before him. It is a great tragedy that our kind appears to have died out."

Sam, all the while, studies him in vague awe tinged with something more abstract – what he's describing sounds right up his alley.

Henry's eyes fall upon the journal in front of Sam. "What is that?" he queries.

"Our dad's journal," he replies. "Everything he ever learned about everything he ever hunted is in here."

"May I look at it?"

Sam nods wordlessly and passes him the leather-bound book. Henry flips through it immediately, enthralled, before a look of poignant sadness casts a shadow on his face.

"What is it?" Sam asks softly.

"This journal… I had ordered it for myself shortly before leaving, in preparation for my initiation… Evidently I do not return, after all."

Neither Sam nor Dean had ever suspected their father was overly sentimental, so it struck them as surprising that he had chosen to keep one of his absent father's belongings so close to his heart. Still, Dean was familiar with this traitorous inclination – he himself had felt deserted many times, and yet it did not stop him from emulating the man.

Dean holds Mary a little closer – this cycle has to end. No more undeserving devotion, no more involuntary abandonment.

This does not escape Henry's notice.

A serene smile playing at his lips, he says, "She would have been inducted into the group, too – a sixth-generation legacy. We'd just begun allow women in, when…"

"When it all went to hell?"

"Yes…"

"Dad never said anything about you being in a secret society," Sam says. "I get why you wouldn't tell your kid, but you never even told your wife the truth? At least she might have given Dad some closure or something when he was older…"

Henry looks cornered. "It was only to protect her," he confesses. "I didn't want Millie to worry, and the secrets of the Men of Letters are extremely closely guarded – no one save the members and the trusted hunters is supposed to have knowledge of their existence."

"Did you have to be a legacy to be inducted into the order?" Claire asks, voice low.

"No," he replies, staring at her intently. "I suppose the spouse of a Man of Letters would be a good candidate, though, in retrospect."

"Oh no, we're not –"

Henry's eyebrows shoot up in obvious scandal, Sam stifles a snicker with the back of his hand, and Dean rolls his eyes.

"Oh," he coughs awkwardly. "I suppose… I suppose social practices much have changed significantly in the past fifty-five years. It's been half a century, after all."

"Claire was a prophet," Dean offers lamely in an attempt to diffuse the tension. "She wasn't a hunter or anything before this."

"Was?"

"I lost my powers some time before Mary was born."

"In this line of work… I take it… I take it the child was something of a surprise?"

At this, Sam legitimately laughs out loud in a short, thundering _Ha!_

"A – um – pleasant surprise," he sputters in an attempt to rectify the situation.

Still, both Claire and Dean are grinding their molars. This was never a conversation Dean wanted to have with his grandfather.

"Y'know," Sam says, leaning back in his chair as though he's just had a revelation, "I'm seeing another pattern in the Winchester family."

"Oh?" Dean humors him.

"Yeah – you, dad – Mary, Adam – you'd better teach her to be careful, Dean. I don't think you want any more _surprises._"

Dean goes white at the horrifying notion, covering the baby's ears. "Enough of this 'surprise' talk," he states vehemently, contrary to his shaken appearance. "I don't want my daughter growing up around that shit, thinking she was an accident or somethin'." He narrows his eyes warily, seemingly unaware that swearing freely in front of her most likely raises some of the same issues.

Claire nearly swoons at the sentiment, but Sam is unimpressed. "She can barely even sit up on her own, _Dean_," he points out impudently. "I don't think she knows what we're talking about."

Dean snorts as though this fact isn't relevant. "Plus, Sammy," he goes on with more levity in his tone, "you wouldn't know about this, but the probability of a malfunction increases with each opportunity for failure."

Dean winks, Sam pushes away from the desk uproariously, and any pangs Claire had been feeling towards Dean vaporize. Henry, all the while, is way out of his league.

"Um," he starts meekly, "who is Adam?"

Sam and Dean silently deflect _You tell him; No, you tell him; Fuck no dude, I'm not telling him; Neither am I!_ Until Dean finally musters the courage to say, "He's, uh, he's our brother. Our _half_-brother."

"John had another child?"

"After our mom died, yeah."

"Where is he?"

"He um… He passed away," Sam finishes for him, voice somber. 'Fell into the depths of Hell' would've opened a whole new can of worms.

"I-I'm sorry…"

"Thanks. We didn't really get to know him, but he was a good kid."

"Your mother – she passed away too? When you were still young?"

"She was killed," Dean corrects harshly. "By a demon."

Henry's hazel eyes widen.

"Y'see, our dad," the blond begins, "our dad had a hard life. First his father walked out on him as a kid, then he survived one of the bloodiest and most hopeless wars in this country's history, only to get married and have his wife burned to death on the ceiling of his youngest son's nursery."

He pauses, sitting across the room with Mary on his lap like a prop, before continuing, "After that, he was left to raise two snot-nosed kids by himself, and he wasn't ever the same. He taught Sam and me to spend our whole lives chasin' after the thing that killed our mom. And when we finally caught up with it, you know what happened? He made a deal with it – he traded his life for mine. So, maybe you can scoff with your hoity-toity suit and your Men of Letters crap and look down on us for bein' what we are. But from where I'm standing, he did the best he could under _impossible_ circumstances. And yeah, he made some mistakes, but he did a hellova lot more good than bad."

"I'm sorry," he repeats, "I-I wish I could've been there for him…"

"Yeah, well it's a little late for that now, don't ya think?"

Henry, clearly distraught and taken aback, ventures, "That's the price we pay for upholding great responsibility. We know that."

"Your responsibility was to your _family_," Dean bites. "Not some glorified book club."

"I was a legacy, I had no choice!" he protests, tears welling.

"Yeah, you keep tellin' yourself that."

"Dean," Claire steps in. They lock eyes, Dean watching her over his daughter's shoulder. "I think that's enough," she says.

"He is right," Henry says after a beat. "I realize now… By virtue of being here alone I'm putting you all in peril – I must go and deal with Abaddon on my own."

"Whoa whoa whoa," Sam stops him. "You said Abaddon is some special rank of demon, right? And _you're _not a hunter – what makes you think you'll be able to take her yourself?"

"I don't need to fight her, I just need to outsmart her. It is irresponsible of me to put you all in danger, especially the child. You are my family; I ought to protect you. I cannot ask any more of you that I already have." He speaks with an air of ancientness about him that the two brothers find brazenly ridiculous – Dean would bet money that he is actually older than their 'grandfather.'

Henry starts again towards the door, but this time it's Dean who stops him, his Winchester big-brother instincts kicking in. "Just wait a sec. Look, you can't go in this alone. We'll help you – we kill Aba-whatever, we Marty McFly you back to 1958, and you be a father to my dad, you hear?"

"I, uh, yes, alright."

All of a sudden, though, it doesn't matter if they have agreed to help Henry because the entire house begins to quake.

* * *

**A/N: I took a lot from the show but I also modified it _drastically_, so I'd be interested to hear what you guys think. And if you haven't seen S8, let me know what you think all the same! The next chapter should be up much quicker than last time. Thanks for reading :)**


	16. My Generation: Part 2

**A/N: Thank you so much to cheer11lindsay, themightypanda, and toridw317 for reviewing the last chapter! I hope you all enjoy this one!**

**Song: My Generation by The Who**

* * *

**CHAPTER 16**

**My Generation: Part 2**

Upon feeling the ominous rumble, Dean's eyes widen uncharacteristically in panic and he swiftly hands Mary off to Claire.

"Take this too," Henry says frantically, giving her an engraved wooden box about the size of a deck of cards. "Make sure it stays safe!"

She doesn't have time to ask what it is before she vaults into the panic room in the basement and seals the iron door firmly behind her. Mary, stunned by the whirlwind of commotion, begins to cry.

Upstairs, the front door flies off its hinges to reveal another female redhead. She leers, cherry lipstick outlining a fan of pearly-white teeth.

"My, my, what a pleasant surprise," she purrs, gray eyes twinkling in sadistic delight.

"Abaddon," Henry Winchester gasps/growls.

Dean has no interest in conversing with this Stepford-wife-looking motherfucker, so he promptly throws Ruby's knife at her. The serrated blade spins through the air in a metallic flash and lands squarely between her collarbones, slicing through her vessel's string of pearls and sending them clattering to the wood floor.

A reddish glow shines through the snow-white veil of her flesh, and she coughs dramatically in pain as though she's had the wind knocked out of her.

But, to their tremendous displeasure, she does not die.

"Those were expensive," she snarls after ripping the dagger out of her chest and regaining her footing.

Sam catches Dean's eye, looking every bit as dismayed as his brother.

"Where is it?" she asks Henry.

"Safe. It's not here."

"Now, I find that difficult to believe," she starts, "seeing as you hardly had time to stop off and hide it somewhere, did you?"

"You can search me, if you like. I'm telling the truth. You're not going to find it."

"Careful," she tsks. "As much as your dear Josie would love to run her hands _all_ over that firm, virtuous body of yours, _I'd_ much rather search you from the inside out, and then do the same with your little friends here… But hand the key over, and I'll restrain myself."

"You _will not_ find it, Abaddon."

"Let's play a game," she proposes gleefully. "I start killing people until you tell me where it is. How does that sound?" With a wave of her hand, she throws Sam and Dean against the den wall and keeps them pinned there, invisible cords tethering their limbs as they thrash against them. "Now… who wants to go first?"

"Wait! I'll make you a deal – you let them go retrieve the key, and take me as collateral."

"NO!" both of his grandsons shout, piecing together that this notorious 'key' is now in Claire's possession.

Ignoring them, she refutes, "I'm not that type of demon, sugar."

"It's the only way I'll give it to you. I need to ensure that they remain safe."

She pouts in contemplation, before eventually responding, "How about this – I'll take the shaggy-haired one as collateral instead, so the other tall drink of water has an incentive to behave, m'kay? And you two bring me the key."

"Fine," Sam answers before anyone else can.

Abaddon's lip twists into a sly, untrustworthy smirk. "Excellent."

. . .

Dean and Henry put on a show of walking into the Impala and exiting the scrap-yard.

"What the _hell_ do you propose we do now?" Dean demands furiously as he drives down the dirt pathway without a destination. "Abaddon is in there with the only family I got left, and the sole reason they're still alive is because she's expecting us to give her something we don't even have!"

"But we _do_ have time," Henry assures him. "Time to formulate a plan."

"Yeah? Well, you're the brains of this operation – get formulating!"

"We cannot kill Abaddon," he reasons, "she's too powerful – but she is still a demon, which means she can be trapped. We just need to figure out a way to slow her down."

"So much for shoving her back to 1958, huh?"

Henry wets his lips and glances briefly at Dean's austere profile. "You were correct in your assertion that this feat cannot be accomplished by any one person," he admits. "But together, I have faith that we can stop her."

He laughs jadedly. "I'm not much for faith, but what I do know is failing is _not_ an option, now more than ever. She may not know Claire and Mary are in there, and I'm gonna make sure as hell she's not there long enough to find out."

"Yes," he agrees. "We will make sure no harm comes to your family, Dean – _our_ family."

Dean's lip furls, some unidentifiable emotion washing over him.

"What the hell is that key, anyway?"

"It leads to the Men of Letters' most secure location," he explains. "It's a veritable fortress, filled with millennia's worth of information and artifacts. It is a hub of supernatural knowledge – if it ever fell into the wrong hands… the horror it could unleash is unspeakable. If Abaddon were to discover it, she could turn the tides on Earth towards evil for the rest of eternity."

"So, we gotta give her a decoy, is what you're saying? And what you gave to Claire – was that the actual key?"

"Yes. I presumed you were sending her somewhere safe, and there was no time to hide it anywhere else."

"Well, we've gotta assume she's tearing Bobby's up looking for it. Once she gets to the basement… The panic room ain't exactly discreet. She shouldn't be able to get in, but then again Ruby's knife shoulda killed her, so…"

"We will return swiftly. Like I said – even if we cannot kill her, we can trap her. We need a way to keep her contained in her body while simultaneously pinning her in one location, correct? Well, I have an idea…"

. . .

Henry and Dean return to Bobby's at sundown. Coral-colored light bathes the corroding cars in the scrap-yard, creating an odd contrast between natural beauty and manmade ugliness.

Dean has never been more terrified in his life. He's hiding it well, but inside he feels as though his heart has been snared in barbed wire, and the bindings tighten every time he thinks of his tiny, defenseless daughter under the same roof as a Knight of Hell.

Everything he loves is bundled together, packed tightly into his dead surrogate father's house like a sitting duck, at the mercy of a bloodthirsty demon. It could all end so quickly, it could all go up in hellfire so easily.

One misstep, and his entire life is over.

Yes, he is mad with fear.

In the past, when Sam or Claire had been captured, he'd been both frightened and livid at the same time; now, he only feels frightened, but he's concealing it beneath the guise of a mercenary.

The depths of his fear startle him, really. He's been scared before, certainly – he's been scared almost perpetually since he was four years old, but this is a different sort of fear. Most of the time, his fear has been rooted in an indistinct sense of self-preservation. Even if he was fearful for Sam or Claire or whoever, he also feared how _he_ would fare if something happened to them. This fear, on the other hand, is wholly separate from himself – he couldn't care less what happens to him.

This could be his tragedy, he thinks. This could be his life-defining tragedy, the one that finally breaks him into little pieces. Just like what happened to his parents, like what happened to Sam and Jess, like what happened to Bobby and his wife, like those times – those bleak, torturous times – when Sam was really, truly dead.

This could be it. This could be the end.

He hauls Henry into Bobby's house, dreading what he is going to see when they cross the threshold with every atom in his body. He feels lightheaded, sick to his stomach. He might have puked, if he hadn't trained himself to manage gut-wrenching stress so early on in his life.

The interior of the home is in ruins. Papers are scattered everywhere. Bobby's collection of books has been totally eviscerated, and the furniture has been leveled.

Abaddon is standing at the epicenter of it all, still bloody, with her crimson-lacquered claws wrapped around Sam's muscular neck. He has four lacerations across his right cheek that look unmistakably like scratch-marks, but other than this he appears to be in one piece.

Dean is so relieved to see him alive that he could kiss Abaddon.

But he would rather kill her.

"Don't do it, Dean. You're making a grave mistake," Henry performs.

"Too late for that now," Dean snips, holding his wrists behind his back and shoving him into the desecrated living room.

"That's the problem with you hunters – you're all so shortsighted."

"Yeah? At least we're not extinct… Abaddon!"

Unfazed, she remarks, "I found the funniest thing downstairs. An iron room covered in Devil's Traps, and a baby's screaming coming from inside. What do you make of that?"

"I'll send Henry over with the box," Dean says, completely ignoring her. If he just doesn't address it… "You do the same with Sam," he goes on. "No tricks."

"My only interest – lucky for you and whatever you're hiding downstairs – is Henry and the key." She lets her hand fall away from Sam's throat. "You two are free to go."

Dean tucks a box into Henry's pocket, and then roughly nudges him towards the center of the room. He peers at him in monumental disappointment, but doesn't move.

The blond Winchester withdraws his pistol and threatens, "You can do this standing, or you can do this crawling."

Begrudgingly, Henry and Sam cross to opposite sides of the room.

In the middle, Sam repents, "Henry, I'm sorry…"

"Save it."

Upon rejoining his brother, he says, "Dean, don't do this, this is a bad idea…"

"Shut your mouth… Alright, Abaddon, you have what you wanted – now get the hell out."

Bloodstained white pumps solidly rooted in the ground, she grins and doesn't budge.

"We had a deal!" Dean exclaims, waving his gun at her. "Aren't you sons of bitches bound to honor deals?"

Hollow laughter bubbles out of her chest. "I already told you, sweet-cheeks – not that type of demon. Surprise! I lied."

Without any warning whatsoever, she shoves her nails into Henry's abdomen; scarlet blood blossoms against the white canvas of his dress shirt.

"Henry!"

Sam starts to rush towards him, but Dean bars him with his arm. "Wait, wait!" he hisses.

Abaddon retracts her hand, and Henry joins in on the laughing. In a blink, he's holding a handgun beneath her chin and pulling the trigger.

"You're not the only one," he says as blood spurts from her jaw.

"Woo!" she shrieks, sounding exhilarated. "What a blast! Now gimme the key."

She reaches into Henry's blazer pocket, only to procure a deck of cards with the joker front and center. She throws it to the floor in frustration, Henry all the while tottering dangerously beside her.

"Where is it!" she shouts, piercing their eardrums and shattering the windows. If Mary had stopped crying, Dean thinks, she most definitely started up again.

"Okay," Abaddon goes on, "we can do this the hard way."

She latches onto Henry's jaw, forcing his mouth open. A black mist travels from her mouth towards his, but is blocked by some sort of imperceptible barrier. She pushes him to the ground, thwarted, and Sam runs to his side. Abaddon tries lunge at them, but her feet are glued to the floor.

"Why am I stuck?!" she demands, voice cracking in her rage.

"Devil's Trap carved into a bullet, bitch," Dean tells her. "Guess you're not as special as you thought."

She chuckles again and says, "You still didn't kill me."

"No, but you'll wish we did," says Dean, before promptly sneaking up behind her and decapitating her with one of the wrought iron fire pokers. "We're gonna cut you up into steaks and bury you under six feet of cement. So yeah, you may not be dead, but you'll sure as hell wish you were."

Sam, positively astounded, is gaping slack-jawed at his brother and cradling Henry against his chest.

"We did it," Henry coughs, blood trickling in a thin line from the corner of his mouth. "I told you we would."

Dean kneels down beside him, his features no longer contorted in anger.

"No, you did it," he tells him. "For a bookworm, that wasn't bad, Henry."

Their boyish grandfather laughs, eyes hooded and dimming fast.

"I'm sorry I judged you two so harshly for being hunters," he says. "I should've known better – you're Winchesters. And as long as we're alive, there's always hope..." With one hand he reaches for Dean, and with the other he reaches for Sam. "I didn't know my son as a man, but having met you two, I know I would have been proud of him."

Dean's lips part as though he wants to say something, but he was never good with this sort of thing – any apologies or reassurances die on his tongue.

And, soon enough, Henry's head lolls back against Sam's shoulder, and he's gone as quickly as he showed up in Mary's closet.

Tears prick Sam's eyes, but they don't make it any further.

Dean stands, brushing off his jeans, and announces, "I'm gonna go get Claire."

In the basement, he bangs on the metal door. "Claire?! It's me – we got 'er, it's safe to come out!"

He hears movement within, along with a baby's whimpering.

In a second Claire emerges, and Dean launches himself at her.

He takes her face in his hands, inspecting her, and chants, "Thank god, thank god…"

Mary is pressed between them, blissfully ignorant of the dire perils in her life.

He kisses her forehead, and she asks, "W-what happened? She came down here, banging on the door… Oh my god, Dean, I was so scared…"

He takes Mary from her and holds her close, her little face, flushed and sticky with tears, buried in the fabric of his shirt and his nose pressed to the top of her downy head. "I know," he says, "I know…"

The world seems different in his eyes, now, as though the kaleidoscope of his perspective has shifted. That raw, unadulterated fear has changed him profoundly, altered the parts of him that he thought unalterable.

They sit on the small cot in the center of the room, the very same cot that haunted his waking nightmares for years, the very same cot Sam was strapped to in his darkest hours, when they were furthest apart.

He doesn't… He doesn't want to feel this anymore, he wants it to stop. But he doesn't know how, he doesn't know what to do.

Usually, hunting – through all its hardships and pain – brought a thrill, a surge of adrenaline, a high that cut the horror.

Now, he feels nothing. There was no thrill in slicing up Abaddon, no surge of adrenaline when he watched her head hit the floor with a dull thud. He just feels the fear trying to seep out of his veins, getting caught in the back of his mind and reminding him _It will never be over._

The heightened state of panic in Purgatory was different, because he only had his own life to pay. Here, everything is different. Here, his actions affect everyone. His brain chemistry isn't screaming _Fight or flight_, it's screaming _Help me, I'm drowning._

And now another Winchester is dead.

Another Winchester has sacrificed himself.

Claire can't seem to stop shaking, he notices, and it's only when he goes to steady her that he realizes he is shaking too.

"I'm gonna end this, Claire," he tells her with conviction. "I'm gonna end this once and for all."

. . .

They give Henry a hunter's funeral, because it's all they know. Maybe the Men of Letters had some sort of special burial practice, maybe Henry would have been appalled to know his grandsons burned him on a pyre amongst weeds and scrap-metal. Maybe he would have been appalled to know this was how they said goodbye to his son, too, along with everyone else they ever loved – watching flames lap over a white shroud, until nothing is left but black ash.

Sam still wonders, sometimes, why he didn't burn Dean's body all those years ago. He wonders what part of him loved his brother so much more than all these other people that he couldn't bring himself to do it.

He remembers Bobby urging him to, telling him it's for the best, and he remembers clinging to his brother's empty, stitched-up corpse like a madman, sobbing and refusing to be torn away from him. _We can't do it, Bobby, we can't_, he'd howled in despair, and he didn't know why, but he just _knew_ they couldn't.

Unlike Dean, Henry Winchester isn't coming back.

Claire shields Mary's face from the orange heat; at sixth months, she's already experiencing her first hunter's funeral, watching fire consume a relative – just like Sam had.

"Y'know, I finally get it," Sam says hollowly, eyes fixed on the pyre.

"Hm?"

"What Cupid said, about Heaven busting ass to get Mom and Dad together. The Winchesters and the Campbells, the brains and the brawn..."

Dean, without looking away from the flames, replies, "I'm glad you see it. All I see in our family tree is a whole lotta death."

Sam stares at his brother sadly. "Any idea what that key opens?" he asks.

"Better'n that," Dean says. "He gave me the coordinates."

* * *

**A/N: I hope you all liked it! In this show, Dean's hostility towards Henry always perplexed me a bit, and at times in this episode he seemed to contradict himself a little bit - but the way I see it (or at least how it's supposed to be in this story), the reason he was so resentful towards Henry for leaving his family is not because he doesn't understand the responsibility he had to the Men of Letters, but because he thought that maybe if Henry hadn't left John, John wouldn't have had such an easy time leaving them (remember, the first season is pretty much just them looking for their dad). I think he would recognize that this is a bit irrational, though, and would ultimately agree that Henry did the right thing in the end.**

**Anyway, let me know what you guys think! Thanks for reading :)**


	17. Good Times Bad Times

**A/N: Thank you so so so much to Carver Edlund, rosesapphire16, Guest, ImpalaLove, and toridw317 for reviewing the last chapter! I hope you guys all enjoy this one! **

**Song: Good Times Bad Times by Led Zeppelin**

* * *

**CHAPTER 17**

**Good Times Bad Times**

In Lebanon, Kansas, the Shurley-Winchester conglomerate finds itself at what appears to be the entrance to a drainage pipe below an old concrete and redbrick industrial structure. Beneath a grassy hunk of earth there is not, in fact, a drain, but instead a shallow stairway leading to a dense iron door.

"Are you sure this is right?" Claire asks doubtfully.

She stretches when she steps out of the Impala, still not used to the car being so cramped – not that her Jetta (now, technically, _Sam's_ Jetta, and soon to be someone else's because he can barely fit his Sasquatch legs into it) is any larger, but usually all four of them don't travel together. That is, before the Abaddon incident, which has made Dean borderline-obsessed with completing the trials. This particular obsession, though, she is entirely supportive of – that night at Bobby's shook everyone to their very core and put the fragility of their situation into sharp focus.

None of them had ever felt fear like that, and none of them ever wants to feel it again.

She takes Mary's car seat along with her as Dean digs the box and key out of his coat pocket. Sam cranes his neck to look up at the blocky, geometric building with unbidden curiosity.

"These're the coordinates Henry gave me," Dean maintains.

The concrete lining around the doorway has turned greenish and mossy, a testimony to how long it has been since anyone last entered the building.

Dean slides the etched box open, revealing a heavy brass key with a triangular, almost masonic symbol engraved into the base; he inserts it into the lock, and they strain their ears to hear the telltale sound of gears turning and clicking into place as he twists it.

When he pushes the door open with a rusty creak, Claire murmurs, "I swear to god, if there are any dead bodies in there…"

It's pitch-black inside, and Sam and Dean quickly switch on their Hardy Boys flashlights (as Claire lovingly refers to them as).

The first thing they shed light on is an Art Deco-esque wrought iron railing and a lower level, which appears to house some sort of control center and switchboard.

"Son of a bitch…" Dean marvels at all the dated-looking technology.

"Lookit this," Sam says, shining his spotlight to the left. "AM radio, a telegraph, switchboard… This was their nerve center…"

"Henry did say that they ran dispatch on a whole team of hunters," Dean reasons.

They move further into the building, and discover a chess set with a boatload of cigarette butts and evaporated beverages beside it. It appears someone had been drinking espresso, and the brownish residue is still staining the white porcelain. The table itself is covered in a sheet of dust, like something out of a stereotypical haunted house.

"Guys, this place is giving me the creeps – Dean, doesn't this remind you of that mansion in New Orleans with the –"

"Relax, Claire," he laughs lightly. "Henry said this place was safe, and I trust him."

She shuts up, but keeps a vice-like grip on the plastic handle of Mary's carrier.

"They probably left quickly to get to the alarm call that ended the Men of Letters," Sam explains. "I doubt it was anything more sinister than that."

"But, to be fair, Abaddon ripping your eyeballs out is pretty damn sinister," Dean quips with a wry smirk.

"Yeah, but… You know what I mean."

Dean finds the generator transfer switch and pulls the lever, sending hundreds of lights buzzing to attention. There's an even louder whirring sound, like wheels rotating, which illuminates a long table in the center of the lower level. They all climb downstairs, only to see a marble and brick room filled with mahogany bookshelves and desks – it vaguely resembles a scaled-down version of the New York Public Library.

"Son of a bitch," Sam echoes.

"Guys, I think we found the Batcave," says Dean.

Claire sets Mary down on one of the desks and paces around the room, awestruck. There are priceless-looking swords mounted on the wall, plush leather chairs in every corner, a record player, aged Cognac… It's a 1950s bachelor's wetdream.

Or, you know, Dean's.

"Are we staying here?" she asks, already knowing that if she wants to leave she's going to have to drag the elder Winchester out by his ankles.

"Hell yeah!" he declares, surprising no one.

Sam and Claire share a furtive smirk regarding his blatant enthusiasm.

Dean goes straight to the pointy objects, and Sam goes for the volumes of books.

"This is frickin' awesome," he says, running his hand appreciatively over one of the mounted blades. "These things are still sharp as hell." He casts a glance over his shoulder at his brother to see his reaction, only to discover that he's already reading. "God, Sam, you are such a nerd…"

Upon further exploring their new hideout, they all come to the conclusion that this place is truly a fortress, capable of withstanding nearly every type of supernatural onslaught imaginable – Henry had been perfectly right to say it was safe. Even more, it is an absolute trove of information; just leafing through some of the files, they've learned things that they never even imagined were possible.

Not to mention, it's well stocked with all the creature comforts you could think of. This was certainly built for men who were accustomed to luxury, _not_ lowbrow hunters.

There's a large, industrial-size kitchen filled with (what was then) top-of-the-line, stainless steel cooking equipment, as well as several bedrooms and bathrooms (miraculously, the water works, and the pressure is fantastic!).

"We need to go shopping," Claire says after a broad survey.

"What for?" Dean gripes.

"Food, for one," she states. "And stuff for Mary."

"Roger that," replies Sam.

"You guys go get that stuff, and I'll clean this place up. I dunno about you, but I'm washing those fifty year old sheets before I sleep on them tonight."

"Ah. Right. C'mon, Sammy – let's go get our Martha Stewart on."

. . .

Watching Dean lose his shit over assembling a crib is one of the most heartwarming and most hilarious things Claire has seen in her entire life.

"Why are the directions in fucking Swedish?!" he bellows, lobbing a screwdriver across the room. He rubs his hands over his face, trying to quell his ire.

"You're good at stuff like this," Claire pep-talks him, mildly impressed that he can even identify Swedish in the first place. "You're always using tools and shit on the Impala – how much different could this be?"

"Yeah, not to mention you managed to stave off the Apocalypse, Dean," Sam adds, arms crossed as he leans in the doorway. "I think you can handle this."

"Get in here and help me," he growls.

Sam huffs and rolls his eyes, but obliges him nevertheless.

Claire, meanwhile, is cleaning, and still has the indistinct sense that some Halloween skeleton is going to pop out of nowhere and jump her.

It's obvious what they're doing – they're making a home here. And maybe it's premature, but her house is trashed, Bobby's is trashed, and this seems as good a place as any. It has a military feel to it, sure, but maybe they had been naïve to think they could ever sustain the sham of normalcy; maybe it's better this way, more natural. Maybe _this_, this island in the sea of supernatural entities trying to kill them, is as close to normal as they're ever going to get. And maybe that's okay.

All she knows is her daughter is safe, and that's what truly matters.

Later, Dean makes dinner on his own accord – artisanal burgers on brioche buns, topped with Gruyere cheese and caramelized onions. Claire takes one bite and nearly slaps him for having concealed this profound talent for so many years.

Sam, through a mouthful of the juicy cheeseburger, commends, "Oh my god, Dean!"

He has just settled down across from his brother and has yet to taste his concoction. "What?" he questions worriedly, "Is it bad?"

"No, it-it's amazing! Since when can you cook like this?!"

"Since we finally got a real kitchen to work with," he says smugly, before sinking his teeth into the bun. "Man, this is awesome," he compliments himself.

Claire wipes her mouth, before remarking, "Wow. Look at you – Domestic Dean. Why did you always let me cook at home?!"

"I like your cooking," he says sincerely, and she melts a little because she knows she's a mediocre cook at best.

"You could honestly be a professional chef," Sam tells him seriously.

"Aw, c'mon, stop," he dismisses, grinning all the same.

Claire looks around the table and is almost moved to tears. She's sitting beside Dean, and Sam is across from them – in a highchair at the head of the table is Mary, with a paper cup of cheerios spilling onto the tray. Every day she's starting to look less like a generic baby and more like Dean – her irises have settled on Claire's cornflower color, but her hair is accumulating in a decidedly platinum-blond mop. Really, Claire supposes she's not beginning to resemble Dean so much as she is starting to resemble her namesake.

The four of them, whatever this is – this crumpled flower that survived the nuclear bomb of bad luck – it's precious. She doesn't know how they've managed to preserve it, but she is so, so thankful that they have.

She wonders abstractly how Sam feels about the whole thing. They are his family, true enough, but only by virtue of being an extension of Dean. She wonders if he wishes he could have the same for himself, if he wishes he could go back to Amelia.

For the year Dean was gone, she encouraged him to. She thought it would be good for him – just because she was wallowing in depression didn't mean he had to, too. But he always refused, always said he had to make sure they were safe, that Dean would want him to make sure they were safe.

She hadn't known she was pregnant for a very long time. The first few months, she blamed the symptoms on her insane grief. She was hardly lucid, and half the signs she suspects she would've exhibited whether she was pregnant or not.

Sam stayed, because right after Dean disappeared she told him the Story, and once he knew the Story he didn't want to leave her alone. And when they found out she was pregnant, any question of whether or not he would continue to stay flew out the window – for the longest time, they thought Mary was as close as they were ever going to get to seeing Dean again.

But Dean came back, and now Sam's stuck firmly in the middle.

When it's time for bed, Dean, Mary in tow, shows Claire how the nursery looks.

"I see you finally put the crib together," she comments, smirking.

"That was all Sam," he admits. "The kid's a freakin' wizard. You'd've thought he'd done it before or something…"

"That's because he _has_," she chuckles. "He put her first crib together too."

"Oh," says Dean, his expression unreadable.

Claire is about to say something, but he's already leading her to their bedroom. He sits down on the edge of the bed, patting the mattress with his free hand, and says, "Memory foam, baby."

She rolls her eyes. "That bed really isn't that big, Dean."

"Sorry I didn't spring for the California King," he scoffs. His features rearrange themselves into a lecherous smile. "Plus," he says, "I don't recall space ever being an issue in the past."

Again, she rolls her eyes, before scanning the room. A collection of firearms lines the wall, and there's a Led Zeppelin album placed meticulously on his desk beside a worn photo of him and his mother.

As sweet as this is, Claire decides she's going to have to make some personal additions to the decor.

"Those knives are going have to come down at some point, Dean," she says, pointing her finger at the wide variety in dangerous proximity to the bed. "And those stakes on the ledge right over the headboard like that? Yikes. Gotta go."

"What? How come?"

"Well, first of all I don't want to be impaled while I'm sleeping, and secondly, pretty soon Mary will be learning to walk and we're going to have to baby-proof this place to the best of our ability. I'm thinking dangling machetes everywhere is a no-go."

He cracks an affectionate grin and stands Mary on his knees. "I guess she's probably right, huh?" he says to the little girl. "Bummer."

"Why don't you go put her to bed," she tells him, flopping back on the memory foam. It's been a long day in the way she's not accustomed to, but she's tired nonetheless.

"This mattress isn't half-bad," she admits as he starts towards the door.

"Toldja. When I come back we've gotta christen it… Maybe I should move those stakes now, come to think of it." He shoots her a bawdy wink, disappearing into the hallway before he can see her roll her eyes for a third time.

In the next room over, she can hear him humming 'Hey Jude' to get Mary to sleep.

Yeah, she thinks, maybe they should move those stakes.

. . .

_**SEVERAL WEEKS LATER**_

Dean slams his cell phone down on the desk with enough force to shatter the screen. Sam, who the motion is directed at, flinches exaggeratedly and looks up from the dossier he'd been reading before he was so rudely interrupted.

Claire redirects her gaze away from Mary, who is playing with blocks on a blanket spread out on the floor.

"Kevin figured it out," is all he says.

Sam hastily shuffles the documents back into the folder and demands, "So? How do we do it?"

"You can kill 'em with anything that'll kill a demon – AKA Ruby's knife or an Angel Blade – and you can see them with something that's been 'scorched by holy fire.' After you kill the bitch, you gotta say some Enochian spell or something. I dunno – he's emailing me the spell."

"Great," says Claire, approaching the desk, "Now all you have to do is find someone with a demon deal about to hit the ten-year mark."

"Actually," Sam says sheepishly, "I already have." He pulls his laptop towards him from the other side of the desk, flipping it open and restoring his minimized windows. A photo of three women and an older man in a cowboy hat pops up. "Meet the Cassity's," he starts. "About ten years ago, they struck oil in a place that _has no oil _and became multi-millionaires. Sound fishy to you guys?"

" 'bout as fishy as it comes," Dean agrees. "So, we gank Cujo, 'double double toil and trouble' it, and then on to the next one. Sound good?"

Claire nods slowly without responding, but Sam looks a bit scatterbrained.

"Yeah, uh, Dean, can I talk to you for a sec," he sputters.

She raises her eyebrows. "If you want to talk to him alone, just ask," she says sweetly, plucking Mary off of the blanket and heading into another room to give them their privacy.

"What is it?" Dean interrogates, cutting right to the chase.

"Dean, one of us is going to have to do these trials – _one_. And it has to be me."

His older brother furrows his brow in an irked scowl. "Now wait just a sec-"

"No, Dean, hear me out," Sam interrupts. "You never let me be the one to head these missions – with Dick Roman, with Kevin and the tablet, before, with Lucifer – I could tell, even back then, that you didn't want to leave me to do it alone – you didn't trust me. But you have to trust me this time. You have to. Who knows how this is gonna end – you can't put your life in jeopardy the way you always do anymore, you get that, right? _I _have to be the one to do this."

"Where's this coming from?" he demands, rubbing his eyes with the base of his palm.

"This is a conversation that needs to be had before we go into this thing guns blazing. I saw the way you looked at me when you thought Claire was in danger, when you left me at that mental institution with Cas and Kevin – you didn't think I could handle it. And I know this road we're about to go down is a similar one, so I just want to be upfront with you. I could just as easily have been the one to go with Cas to kill Dick – but you insisted it be you-"

"That's because you always manage to screw something up, Sam!" he bursts out before he can stop himself. "Lilith? Ruby? We can't take chances with this, you understand me?"

"Of course I understand! And I also understand that if it comes to it, you'll sacrifice yourself if you have to – like you did with Dick Roman, Dean, like you always do! I know, I know I made some mistakes in the past. And I regret them with all my heart, and I'm not going to let anything like that happen again – I want this to end just as badly as you do! But it's gotta be _me_ that does it this time."

"No, Sammy. No. I need you safe – I need all of you safe, and even if that means I have to-"

"To what? To get yourself killed in the process? No. Not happening. Just because it's what Henry did – what Dad did – doesn't make it okay. You die, Dean, whaddyou think happens to Mary, huh? How d'you think Claire's gonna take that? How did _Dad_ take that?"

Sam pauses, studying Dean, who's shaking his head as though he doesn't believe what he's saying. "Mom was a hunter first," Sam tells him. "You always forget that – you only remember that she died. But she was a hunter before Dad was, a hunter from the very beginning, just like you – and you heard her as well as I did – she _never_ wanted this for us, just like you don't want this for Mary. But if you're gone? Who's gonna stop it from happening? You want to start another fucking Winchester cycle?"

Dean, bone-white, grinds out, "You know Claire would never do what Dad did…"

"Are you sure, Dean? I saw what happened once, and let me tell you it wasn't fucking pretty. Are you willing to roll that die again? You tell me, how do people act when the world is ripped out from under them, huh? Is that something that's easy to predict? You equipped her with everything she would need to know to be exactly like Dad – she knows how to hunt, she knows all this shit that he had to learn for himself. She's already one step ahead. Now tell me, how sure can you be? How fucking sure?"

They're both unsteady and quiet for several long moments, Sam standing and Dean sitting, before the younger of the two goes on, sounding more than ever like the little brother, "You said before, you said you saw the light at the end of the tunnel. You said it wasn't going to be like it always was."

"It's not – I don't want it to be," he insists earnestly. "I don't want to die, Sam, I never have! I fought like a mother to get out of Purgatory, to get back to you guys. Don't you dare think even for a second that this is a suicide mission for me!"

"Even so, you can't risk it. You were so hard on Henry for abandoning his family – how could you turn around and do the same exact thing?"

"Listen, Sam, I can't have you getting hurt. I couldn't deal with it. We've been there before, and we already know how that story fucking ends. If something happens to me but it means you and Claire and Mary are safe for the rest of your lives, _that_ I can deal with."

"Do you think _we_ can deal with that? We know how _that _story ends, too! What if something happens to you and Claire goes off the deep end?"

"That's not the way she is, and even if she had a personality transplant you would make sure she didn't."

"She's _your_ fucking girlfriend, Dean! You're the one who's supposed to be there for her, not me! I-I can't believe this. I can't fucking believe you." Sam combs his fingers through his hair, distraught and angered by his brother's stubbornness. "Claire!" he calls, "Can you come here for a minute?"

She materializes, looking hesitant. "What is it?" she asks, voice spread thin.

"I need you to talk some sense into my brother," Sam snarls. "He's acting like a fucking idiot."

Claire's expression is half-puzzled, half-stricken. "About what…"

"Only one person can do these trials, right? Well, he wants it to be him – even if that means he dies in the process."

She whirls around to look at Dean, who's at the desk massaging his hairline in apparent vexation.

"That's not…"

She sits across from him and pulls his hand away from his face, causing his eyes to flutter open.

"Listen to me," she says calmly. "You are not doing this. I'm telling you right now, I'm putting my foot down. You are not leaving me and your daughter again – you're just not."

"Claire…" he starts ruefully. "I'm not… That's not…" He sighs deeply, collecting his thoughts, before restarting, "I'm not cut out for this. I still have nightmares every night, I still see things in the shadows, I still hear screams ringing in my ears. I'm afraid of the kind of father I'm going to be. If I can just do this one thing… I need to know that you all are okay… I just…" He values their lives more than values his own, that much is obvious. But from Claire's perspective – and even from Sam's – this is coming out of left field.

He looks off to the side because he can't bear to see the effect his words are having, but she forces his chin back to her direction. "Dean. Let Sam do this, and then we'll deal with what comes after, okay? A world without demons isn't necessarily a world without hunting, but it'll make it a whole lot easier for hunting to just be a day-job, to stop _us_ from being the ones being hunted. But you _have _to let Sam do this first."

Dean searches her eyes feverishly, before finally grunting, "Fine."

Sam, meanwhile, watches this scene unfold and is overwhelmed with a sudden epiphany. All those months before the Dick Roman fiasco, he observed very clearly how these two brought out the absolute worst in one another; but now, he sees that the opposite is true, too.

"Sammy, you do it," says Dean with a strained, halfhearted smile, "and I'll be there to make sure you don't fuck it up."

* * *

**A/N: I feel like in the show Dean often flip-flops between extreme optimism and extreme pessimism, so I tried to capture that a bit here. I also think the part of him that always thought Sam and their father didn't rely on him as much as he relied on them would, perhaps subconsciously, be haunted by the notion that maybe Claire and Mary would be better off without him. I touched on this a little bit - in the end, he's a hunter at heart, and I think that as much as he wants to be a father, too, he would have a very difficult time reconciling the two, and an even harder time with the idea that he would have to put Sam in harm's way in order to uphold his responsibility to his child.**

**Oh, also - you might have noticed that Claire says she tried to get Sam to go back to Amelia - that's because Sam never told her Amelia was engaged.**

**Pretty please let me know what you think!**


	18. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

**A/N: SO sorry for the delay! I had a bit of trouble with this chapter because it's very closely based on the episode (which should make it easier, but idk I'm weird). Usually I like to wait to write until I can't contain my thoughts and the words are just bursting out of me; I think that usually gives the story more character, which is why I waited so long to post this one. Hope you can forgive me! It's really long, at least.**

**As always, thank you so so so much to sarahmichellegellarfan1 (seriously, so many reviews - thank you so much!), cheer11lindsay, Carver Edlund, and ImpalaLove! You guys are amazing! (I'm so mad the formatting doesn't let me make a heart, but imagine a heart here).**

**Song: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap by AC/DC**

* * *

**CHAPTER 18**

**Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap**

Shoshone, Idaho is about a day's drive from Lebanon. The Cassity's live on a ranch, and the grounds are appropriately well-manicured to suit the standards of one of the country's wealthiest families. The grounds are extensive, containing stables as well as a less rustic mansion, which is presumably where the Cassity family resides.

Sam and Dean cruise up the complex in the Impala, looking wholly out-of-place amongst a sea of tractors, Range Rovers, and BMWs.

Working underneath a tractor is a slim young woman with thick, jet-black hair and chiseled features.

"Hey pal, who runs this joint?" Dean questions.

She slides out from her station, looking far less grease-stained than she should. She wipes an invisible bead of sweat from her brow with the back of her dainty hand, before replying, "You're looking at her," in some sort of vaguely Latin accent.

"You own the ranch?" Sam asks disbelievingly as they both size her up.

"Nope, just manage the property."

Both brothers nod in unwitting unison, equally unconvinced by her claim.

"You guys here about the job?" she asks.

They look around aimlessly as their minds churn, before Dean eventually fabricates, "How'd you guess?" and the two subconsciously act in sync again, each flashing her the same forced smile.

"We get our share of drifters," she tells them, not unkindly.

"Ah."

"Ever worked a farm before?"

"Definitely," Dean contends.

"We're quick learners," amends Sam.

Just then a chubby, grizzly-looking man approaches them. He's wearing a nut-brown blazer, but his beard is unkempt with wiry strands of gray snaking through the auburn roughage; the saying about putting lipstick on a pig comes to mind.

"Ellie, what've we got here?" he asks good-naturedly.

"These two are here about the job," she tells him.

"I'm Dean, this is Sam," the shorter of the two introduces, shaking the man's hand firmly.

"Carl Granville," he replies.

"So, you're not a Cassity," Sam surmises.

"My wife is. Her and her family own the place… I'm just one o' those, uh whatcha call 'em – trophy husbands," he says, patting his rotund belly with a snicker. "So're we hirin' the fellas?" he asks Ellie.

"Not sure yet," she replies, shooting the brothers a flirtatious smirk.

Dean swallows heavily and Sam's lip twitches.

"C'mon, they seem like swell guys," he says with a heartfelt smile.

Both Winchesters stare at him blankly, entirely unaccustomed to making a positive first impression.

"He's right, we're swell," adds Dean, sounding like he's lying. His hands are stuffed into the pockets of his army-green jacket and he's leaning against the Impala with a plastered-on smile, looking vaguely up to something.

Ellie raises her eyebrows at the two, and Sam soon mirrors his brother once more. Her gaze lingering on Dean a tad longer than the occasion calls for, she says, "Follow me," and leads them to the stables.

She gives them the job, which amounts to nothing more complex than shoveling horse manure and bunking together in a room that's half the size of the motel rooms they've grown used to, and a quarter of the size of their bedrooms in Kansas.

"Goddammit, I miss my room," Dean laments, the stink of horse crap affronting his nostrils. They're no strangers to dirty work, but this is a profound stoop even for them.

"We'll be back soon enough," Sam assures him distractedly. "So, what's the game plan?"

"I'm thinking first we do a little reconnaissance – try to figure out who made the deal, and then go from there," the older Winchester answers. "I think we can rule out Ellie 'cause she's the help, and Carl don't really seem like the soul-selling type."

"So who're you thinking? Carl's wife? Alice?"

"Ding ding ding."

"So what, should we talk to her?"

"Why, so she can lie to us and then call the cops?" Dean suggests with a droll smirk. "Nah, I don't think so. We're gonna have to go stalker on this one, Sammy. Might as well observe the rest of the family too, since they're coming in. They'd've had just as much a reason as Alice to make the deal."

"Okay," Sam agrees.

. . .

Following Alice Cassity proves fruitless, and that night Carl Granville is torn to ribbons by a 'wolf.'

Sam would recognize this type of massacre anywhere – the sight of Dean's shredded corpse, marinated in a stew of his own viscera, is forever seared behind his eyes. He's the one who cleaned him, after all, the one who washed away the gore, who threaded black twine through rubbery flesh, who didn't have to worry about his hands shaking violently as his body heaved or the precision of his sutures because his brother couldn't feel it anyway.

Yes, Carl Granville was killed by a hellhound.

And something is wrong, because Sam knows, Sam _knows_ how Alice should be acting, and she's just – she's just _not._

Sam is familiar with the numbness of grief. It's something that comes after, when the loss becomes intangible, when you start to forget how their freckles fall like grains of sand against their skin, or the way their nose curves slightly to one side.

The numbness is a very real stage, but it is not the first one.

When you can see the face of your loved one, still-there but still-dead, the grief makes you sick. You want to shake them, to throttle them just to see their body move, to pound their chest to make it look like they're breathing again. But you can't because you can't see straight, because your vision is blurred by tears and the blood throbbing in your temples, because your limbs are stiff like all your bones have fused together.

Carl is lying on the bluestone patio, eyes open and throat open too, and Alice is just sitting there with a barf-colored blanket hung over her shoulders.

Police lights flash patriotically, red, white, and blue in the night as the officers do their monkey-dance of deductive incompetence and throw a sheet over Carl's lumpy cadaver.

"Sorry, Ellie," says Dean, completely unaware of the trauma this is dredging up for his brother. "Carl seemed like a good guy."

She tears her eyes away from the bloodstained shroud. "The best," she replies, arms crossed over her roiling stomach. She is glad when she can no longer see the body.

"They've been reintroducing wolves into these parts," announces the geriatric sheriff, "but I never thought…"

"This wasn't a wolf," Ellie interrupts, retreating into the mansion in horror.

Dean pulls Sam aside. "Son of a bitch," he says.

Sam's brows are pulled together in a troubled frown and he sucks his cheeks between his back teeth. "So, whaddyou think?" he asks, unable to make eye contact with Dean. _Those eyes were once so empty, so lifeless, staring at him, not seeing anything… Green but dull, like unpolished jade…_

Dean doesn't seem to comprehend why his brother is so bothered – _he's_ the one who was doggy chow, after all, but for whatever reason Sam is losing his head over it. "I think Carl signed the deal, and now he's dead. The hellhound's gone, and we were too busy chasin' after a pile of jack to stop it," he blurts out in frustration. He presses his lips together, before continuing, "Let's get our stuff and get outta here."

Sam follows his brother back to the stables, still rattled, only to find Alice brushing one of the chestnut mares.

_No_, he thinks, this isn't right. She should be weeping over a hollow corpse, crying out until her vocal chords fray; she should be clinging to her husband, latched onto him so tightly she has to be pried away with the Jaws of Life.

She shouldn't be grooming horses.

"You okay, Mrs. Cassity," he asks, voice hoarse with the mere recollection of his pain.

"I'm fine," she murmurs, and the knots in Sam's face intensify.

"You sure?"

Alice Cassity is an attractive woman with brown hair and crystal blue eyes, but right now her features are contorted into a bewildered grimace.

"I really am," she says. "I know I shouldn't be, because I loved Carl… I think… I just can't remember why…"

Sam's frown deepens even further. "Whaddyou mean?" he asks, taking a step towards her.

"I mean… You know Carl grew up around here, we went to school together, and he was always mooning over me, but I never… Y'know, I used to make fun of him."

"When did you two get together?" Sam goes on, his suspicion mounting.

"Valentine's Day, 2003," she answers. "At this party… Carl was there and it was like I was seeing him for the first time… Y'know, suddenly he was cute, smart, funny… It was magic."

Sam's lips part to an oval of newfound understanding.

"Carl and I were happy for ten years," she informs him, focus centered on the horse. "And now he's dead, and I'm not sad, angry, just… fine…"

Sam rushes back to the room to find Dean, who is stuffing clothes into his duffle when he walks in.

"Carl wasn't our guy," Sam bursts out as soon as the door is shut.

"Huh?"

"I thought Alice was acting weird," he explains, "so I talked to her – I'll bet you anything Carl made a demon-deal ten years ago to get her to fall in love with him. Her exact words were 'it was magic,' and now that time's up it's like she barely even knew the guy. Plus, we know that demons tend to make two or three deals at the same time before they send the dogs in to collect. It makes sense that Carl wouldn't be the only one who sold his soul ten years ago, and there's still gotta be someone who made the oil deal. Look, as of tomorrow, they're all gonna be right here…"

"And you wanna scope 'em out?"

"Yeah, and so should you," says Sam, narrowing his eyes.

"Alright," he sighs. "two days, then we look for another way."

. . .

As the rest of the Cassity family rolls in, Ellie gives them a synopsis of each member. The oldest is Alice, who they are already well acquainted with, the middle is Cindy, a coquettish country singer, and the youngest is Margot, who lives in Paris. The patriarch of the family is Noah, a seventy-one year old who just married his fifth wife, a lingerie model. A real conventional sort of family, Dean had remarked snidely.

The Brothers Winchester, diverters of the Apocalypse and hunters extraordinaire, have been reduced to nothing more than manservants.

Sam is pouring copious amounts of Pinot Noir into the family members' glasses (make sure you let it aerate, Ellie had told him, and he'd snorted gauchely), and Dean is grilling hunks of steak.

Ellie evaluates his work appreciatively.

"Impressed?" he teases.

"I do like a man who can handle his meat," she says.

The double-entendre whacks him in the skull like a stray pitch and his hand nearly slips into the flames. He gulps and averts his eyes, in no mindset to be fighting off unwanted advances. When she walks away, he lets out a subconscious breath of relief; he may be committed to Claire, but that doesn't mean he doesn't still enjoy window-shopping. Just as long as he doesn't touch, which is a mistake he is _never_ going to make again. Plus, he knows Sam would likely make Mary fatherless if he showed even the vaguest indication of intent.

Inside, his not-so-little brother has front row seats to his very own rendition of the Real Housewives of Shoshone. He thought Dean could be snippy, but boy was he wrong – these people are in another league. Sam would definitely not consider himself a gossip, but it is impossible to ignore the drama that's unfolding at the dinner table. _Apparently_ Noah once caught Margot and Carl having sex in the barn. _Scandalous_.

"Are they always like this?" he hisses tensely to Ellie.

"More or less."

"How can you work here?"

"I love the property, I love the animals, and I tune out the people."

Sam, uncorking his fourth bottle of wine, can only make a face of disgruntlement.

"I can't remember the last time we all sat down and had a meal together," says Alice from the other room.

"It was at the old crappy house, when Daddy invited that traveling salesman to dinner," Cindy, all blonde hair and boobs, elaborates.

"Yeah, _him_," Margot says with a dreamy spark in her eye.

"He was so charming," Alice adds with the same spark, and Cindy concurs.

"English," she fawns.

"What was his name? Kenny?" Noah interjects.

Sam walks in just in time to hear all three women, in unison, sound out Crowley's name, and he grips the bottle of wine so tightly it nearly explodes in his hand.

"Shit," he mutters under his breath, excusing himself abruptly.

"Dean, it was Crowley," he informs his brother, who still has a pair of steel tongs in his hand.

"Crowley?" he repeats, quirking an eyebrow.

"That's what they said – apparently he swung through town ten years ago, to the day."

"So what, you think tea n' crumpets made these deals and now he's collecting?" he demands gruffly.

"Or he just sent his dog, told it to fetch? Dude's King of Hell, peddling a few souls? That's gotta be below his pay grade."

"I guess, but d'you have any idea who signed the dotted line?"

"I have no clue – it's brutal in there."

"Alright, so that means this puppy is coming _tonight_."

"Yeah, most likely."

"Okay, you stay in there and seal the place with the goofer dust, and I'll go scorch something with holy fire. We've still got a jug of holy oil in the trunk."

Dean starts to walk towards the barn, but Sam stops him.

"Whoa whoa whoa, whaddyou think you're doing?"

"I just told you – I'm going to find a couple of pairs of glasses or something to set on fire. Problem?"

"Don't you dare try to play me, Dean. You get what we need, then you come straight back, you understand? We had an agreement."

The elder of the two rolls his eyes exasperatedly. "Yeah yeah, don't get your panties in a twist, Ma."

. . .

Sam had not anticipated how difficult it would be to explain his actions to these people, and what he'd anticipated even _less_ was a drunken Margot and Noah trudging out into the woods with hunting rifles in the dead of night.

He jogs down the rain-slick driveway after them, calling, "Hey, hey hey, where're you going?"

"Wherever I damn well please," the elderly man grunts. "Wolf that killed my son-in-law… This man-eater's gotta be put down."

"We're doing this for Carl," Margot supports, she and her father marching militantly, shoulder-to-shoulder.

"Jus-just hold on a second," Sam addresses their backs. It's absurd, this old man and slight young woman going off hunting by themselves – and after a hellhound, no less.

"Nope, goin' now."

"I'll come with you," Sam tries.

At this, the two turn around.

"You know anything about hunting, boy?"

Sam is tempted to laugh for a variety of reasons, one of which is the fact that even if he wasn't an expert hunter, he is still nearly a foot taller than both of them and would be an asset regardless.

"A little bit, yeah," he answers with a sniff.

Noah and Margot silently deliberate amongst themselves, before Noah nods her the go-ahead and she hands Sam her rifle.

"Let's do it," the white-haired patriarch says, leading the way into the woods.

Sam keeps a death-grip on his gun, while the other two are hunched a clutching their respective firearms, and soon the three part ways in their search.

Every crunch of leaves sends a shiver of terror through Sam's veins; he has little confidence in his ability to protect himself, let alone two other people, and they've just made themselves scarce.

Completely on-edge, he is startled to the brink of attacking when the barrel of Noah's rifle penetrates his periphery vision. He grabs the cool metal reflexively, gasping out a shaky, "_Jesus!_"

"Watch yourself, boy," the old man warns menacingly. He gives him a pointed look, before his features morph into a look of acute worry. "Where's Margie?"

"I-I thought she was with you," Sam stutters.

As if on cue, a bloodcurdling shriek rings out from between the lined tree trunks, and the two men race towards the source.

Sam's nightmares are unfolding before their very eyes: Margot is on the ground, whimpering and painted in a fluid the same color as the wine Sam had been pouring for her all night. A growling noise rumbles from the air surrounding the body, but the creature mauling her is invisible. Sam swiftly reorganizes his scrambled thoughts and jumps into action, aiming his rifle at the unseen beast and pulling the trigger.

There is a whine and a spurt of black, and the hellhound seems to abandon its kill.

The trouble is, Margot is already mortally wounded. She dies within seconds of Sam shooting the monster, her carotid artery completely in tatters and her azure eyes glossed in a film of death.

"Go back to the house!" Sam orders Noah, herding him away from his daughter's mangled corpse.

"No!" he fights desperately, but Sam easily overpowers him.

. . .

Meanwhile, his brother is having a starkly different experience in the barn. As Dean passes two pairs of glasses through holy fire, Ellie approaches him unexpectedly.

He hurriedly stamps out the flame, oblivious to the pair of hipster lenses magnifying his already-large eyes.

"I like it," she says, prompting his memory.

He quickly removes the glasses, folds them gracelessly, and shoves them into his pocket along with the other pair.

"The whole Clark Kent look…"

"Ellie, hey," he greets awkwardly, shuffling his feet in the straw.

"Hey," she says. She keeps walking far beyond when she should have stopped, coming to stand uncomfortably close to him.

Dean, trying to figure out how his personal space was violated to so quickly, remains stock-still as she fingers the lapels of his jacket.

"I think you're really hot," she purrs. "You wanna go to my room and have sex?"

… _and_ Dean's eyes bug out of his head. He's usually pretty good at reading signals, but _Jesus_, this is brazen even by his standards. He takes a long, measured step backwards, widening the gap between them, and glowers at her in utter stupefaction.

He is momentarily dumbstruck, but eventually manages, "What?"

"Right… Sorry, I don't usually do this… I guess I'm sowing my oats…" She stalks closer to him, hand still planted on his chest, lips a hair's breadth away from his, and eyelids drooping.

"I-I can't," he stammers hastily.

Her eyes widen dramatically and she lurches away. Now it's her turn to sputter, "What? Okay… um… embarrassing…"

Dean, breaking eye contact, replies, "I, uh, I have a girlfriend."

"Oh my god, I'm sorry – I should've – I just thought, you know, you guys are drifters… I'm so sorry, I should've asked…"

"It's fine," he grits out, eyes fluttering closed in his intense discomfort.

"So, is it, um, is it like a long distance thing?"

"Umm, not really?" The pitch of his voice is higher than usual, and foreign to his own ears. "We actually – uh – we actually just had a daughter…"

"Oh my god," she repeats, covering her flushed face with her hands. "I am _so_ sorry. I swear, I'm not a homewrecker… I'm just… I'm just gonna go…"

Dean, unable to think of anything to say, coughs out the phantom of a laugh and waves to her rigidly-but-jovially as her silhouette fades into the darkness. Once she's out of sight, his posture deteriorates and he slumps against the wall, running a hand through his spiked locks. Dean has always run headfirst into trouble, but this must be what it feels like to evade it – it's a relief, actually.

He straightens up before heading in the direction of the mansion, eager to tell his brother what happened.

Inside, Sam is running around spreading goofer dust everywhere like a madman, and Dean, with a crooked grin, hisses, "Dude, Ellie just propositioned me in the barn – why do chicks dig unavailable guys?"

"That's great, Dean," Sam replies in a frenzy, "Margot is dead."

Dean feels as though his brain has been struck by lightning. "What?"

"Hellhound got her."

"Shit…"

"Noah saw. Time to break the news. You wanna do it, or should I?"

"I'll do it…" Dean mutters darkly.

When Sam is done securing the entrances to the home, the two pace into the living room, where the rest of the family is seated.

"What was that thing?" Noah demands upon seeing them.

"A hellhound," Dean replies with unprecedented bluntness, hunter-mode in full effect. "When you sell you soul to a demon, they're the ones that come to rip it out of you."

"Demon?" Alice parrots incredulously.

He snaps his head in her direction and states, "Crowley. Poncey guy, about yea big, mountain of dicks. We know he was here ten years ago, makin' dreams come true. Now if you didn't sign, great. That freak out there won't touch you. But if you did, I need to know, and I need to know _now_. So, hands up."

Noah, attempting to wrap his head around this ludicrousness, says, "So wait, t-the British guy was a demon? And now there's a hellhound after us? Are you insane?!"

"They're _obviously_ insane," Cindy interjects.

"Don't play dumb," Sam says, voice low.

"Yeah, I'm not playing. I didn't sell my damn soul."

"Well, somebody did," Dean barks. "And the sooner that idiot owns up, the sooner the rest of you can go."

The sisters look at one another, shaking their heads in apparent denial.

"Alright, then you're all gonna sit here on lockdown while we clean up your mess," Dean snaps. "Now, I _know_ at least two of you have seen what these things can do, so I pray to _God_ you're not stupid enough to try to leave here. But, just in case," he says, procuring three pairs of handcuffs, "I brought these."

"There's no way in hell I'm putting those on!" Cindy protests.

Dean sends her a lethal glare. "You're gonna put them on, or I'm gonna make you. Your choice."

Cindy shuts up, but reciprocates his simmering glare.

"Good." He hands each of them a pair of cuffs and watches them tether themselves to the furniture.

"Who are you people?" Alice questions in detached astonishment.

"We're the ones who're gonna make sure you don't get your throats ripped out, that's who. Now all of you just shut up and let us do our job."

Once all three are detained, he turns to his brother and says, "Alright. Let's go gank Huckleberry Hound, Sammy."

. . .

Outside, Dean hands Sam the second pair of glasses and puts his on. Dean soon discovers that the Clark Kent comparison was really far more apt for Sam – Dean's glasses are outlined in thick black, but Sam's have a retro half-frame.

The holy-oiled lenses cast a bluish tint on their surroundings, and the leaves glisten with raindrops that have refused to evaporate. It rained earlier in the day, and now a dense fog is up creeping up from the warm earth, misting their glasses. They were lucky they weren't particularly strong prescriptions, otherwise they would both be fairly blind.

Dean actually suspects the lenses – apart from the glass needing to be cleaned – are _aiding_ his vision, which he finds distinctly unsettling. _I'm getting too old for this_.

They head into the stables and are shocked to hear 'I Touch Myself' by the Divinyls blaring loudly.

"What the fuck…" Dean mutters, trotting towards the origin of the noise, which reveals itself to be Ellie's room.

Dean raps sharply on the door, before cracking it open. She's completely unaware of the brothers' presence, swaying in the middle of the room with her eyes closed and a bottle of beer in her hand.

Sam cuts the music. Her eyes fly open.

"Hmm you two are just in time," she murmurs drunkenly, treading towards Sam's sturdy figure with a predatory glint in her black eyes.

"Hey – uh – wha-are you okay?" he forces out as she molests the neckline of his shirt.

"I'm better now that you two _beautiful_ men are here…"

The Winchesters lock eyes, incredibly daunted. It hadn't really ever occurred to them that women could want _both_ of them, or at least not at the same time, and it wasn't anything they ever wanted to contemplate, either. They're _brothers_…

"Yeah, uh, okay," Sam says, holding her at an arm's length as Dean checks the window.

"Whatever you see, whatever you hear, you've gotta stay in here with the door locked, and sit tight, okay?" he instructs. "This is gonna sound crazy, but there's something evil out there."

She inclines her head to peer at Dean, still sinking into Sam's grip. "I know," she says frankly.

"You know?" Sam echoes.

She turns her head again, her dark eyes boring into Sam's. "It's coming for me," she says.

Sam is about to ask her to elaborate, but there's a rustling of hay in the barn and a howl.

"Quick," Dean snaps, "D'you have any more goofer dust?"

"Yeah," Sam replies, jolting into action. He takes a burlap sack out of his back pocket and pours a ring around Ellie's feet, telling her, "Whatever you do, whatever you hear, you _have_ to stay inside this circle."

"O-okay," she says fearfully.

The brothers then carefully tread outside, glasses on and weapons drawn.

At first, they don't see or hear anything apart from the moist, noisy breathing of the horses.

However, soon enough there's an alarmingly familiar growl, and they see a shape moving at the entrance of the barn. The image of the hellhound isn't completely clear apart from its ruby-red eyes; it is as though it is made of some metallic, reflective substance and they can only see light refracted off the border of it's wolf-like figure. This gives it a sort of bluish aura, like it's not really there – but Dean knows well enough that this creature is as solid and deadly as anything else they've ever hunted.

"So you're Crowley's bitch," Dean goads. "I guess pets really do look like their owners."

The hellhound springs into action. Although it's not targeting the Winchesters, they have the definite impression that it will gladly rip through them to get to Ellie.

"Whaddyou waitin' for? Come and get it!" Dean continues to provoke.

"Dean," Sam mutters, "I think that's enough." He shifts his grip on the hilt of Ruby's knife, suddenly afraid that his brother might try to kill the hellhound instead of letting him do it, afraid of his brother being slaughtered in front of his eyes _again.._.

In a whirl of dust, mist, and fog, the beast rears up and slashes Dean across the abdomen, propelling him against the paneled wall. They hear the wood splinter and Dean's glasses fly off in the commotion, but he can still make out the hellhound's grisly figure in the dirt, and he can _certainly _still feel its hot, rancid breath on his face.

Without a second thought, Sam leaps towards it, doing a barrel roll as it redirects its murderous fury at him. Unfortunately for the beast, Sam is just as furious. He is _not _about to let this son of a bitch kill his brother. He is _not _going to go through that again, not going to have the taste of salt and copper and bile cling to his palate for weeks, for long after he's washed himself clean, for long after he's shoveled dirt into a shallow grave. He's not going to floor the Impala purposelessly down the highway back to Kansas, wondering at every bridge _Should I go off it? _

He's just _not_.

This is personal.

He holds its snapping jaws away from his jugular with one hand, using the other to slice a jagged incision between its ribs, all the way down to its gut. A black sludge spills from its body, drenching him.

He throws the creature off, panting and now thoroughly soaked in its tar-like blood.

"Shit," Dean grunts, applying pressure to his wound; luckily, it's nothing too serious.

"You okay?" Sam asks, breathing raggedly and seemingly unfazed by the fact that it looks like he just swam through an oil spill.

"I will be," he says. He hauls himself to his feet and doubles over in pain, gripping his right side tightly. _Man_, does he hate hellhounds.

Sam digs the Enochian spell out of his jeans, trying futilely to iron out the wrinkles in the paper with his filthy hands. "S-should I do it now?"

Dean looks torn; this is it, this is the moment of truth. Once Sam does this, there's no going back.

He hesitates.

Sam says, "I'm doing this, Dean. It's gotta be me."

Defeated, the older brother hangs his head, but nods.

"Okay," Sam starts. "Kah-nuh-ahm-dahr…"

Something strikes him like molten lava rushing into his heart; it's something between a surge of power and a poison being injected into his bloodstream. He drops to his knees in the sticky, blackened hay and watches as a red glow streams up his arm from the inside of his wrist, illuminating his veins. They look like black vines suspended in his flesh.

"Sam? Sam!"

Sam groans in pain, but forces his breathing to regulate. He clambers to his feet and, through labored gasps of air, says, "I'm fine. I'm okay."

Dean looks wholly doubtful, his brow knitted in a concerned frown.

"I can do this," Sam insists.

Dean wishes he believed him.

* * *

**A/N: Don't worry, we'll get to see Claire again in the next chapter! I hope you all enjoyed this one and didn't mind the changes I made to the canon. Please let me know what you think! :)**


	19. Sick and Tired

**A/N: Thank you so much to Guest, sarahmichellegellarfan1, ImpalaLove, Lindsay, and toridw317 for reviewing the last chapter! I hope everyone likes this one.**

**Song: Sick and Tired by Iron Maiden**

* * *

**CHAPTER 19**

**Sick and Tired**

The Winchester brothers return to the bunker looking like they've been road-hauled through Hell and back. Dean has a gauze pad taped to his right side and all Sam's clothes bear inky splotches, but even aside from their obvious ailments, their faces are lined with fatigue.

Upon witnessing their disheveled state, Claire's heart somersaults between her lungs.

"Oh my god," she mutters, unconsciously tracing her fingertips over Dean's torso as she examines him. She ghosts over the slashes in his shirt – through which the extensive dressings are visible – with a disapproving scowl.

While she fusses over him, he peers down the bridge of his nose at her with an amused smirk.

"I'm fine," he assures her, gripping her shoulders. He should be used to the way the planes of her body feel by now, but she still seems so fragile.

"Fine my ass," she scoffs. "When's the last time you changed this bandage?"

"It's just a flesh wound, babe," he dismisses, pulling her against him. She wraps her arms around his waist, flush to his left side and conscientiously avoiding his injury, and stands on her toes meet his lips.

"God, you two make me sick," Sam snorts, heading over to Mary's playpen.

Claire flashes him a cheeky grin, but Dean exclaims, "Ay! I don't want you getting hellhound guts all over my kid, Sammy."

Sam rolls his eyes. "It's just a stain, Dean. I washed this shirt, unlike _you_."

Claire says, "It's fine, Sam, you can pick her up. And now that he mentions it, you do kinda stink, Dean."

"I only had time for a whore's bath," he complains sanctimoniously.

"What the hell is that?"

"He means he only got to wash his face," Sam translates flatly. He hoists Mary up with great ease, and her chubby legs kick as they dangle in the air above his head.

Dean says, "Yeah. Time for a shower, I think. Care to join?"

She shakes her head as though she's dealing with a horny teenager. To be fair, though, Dean's libido pretty much fits this characterization, as does his overall demeanor whenever their lives aren't in danger.

"Remember what happened in Wyoming," she hisses darkly, the base of her skull smarting painfully at the memory. She had forfeited her shower sex virginity to Dean, and it ended in a concussion and the shower curtain rod being ripped clean off the wall.

"This shower is much more spacious," he says with mock-solemnity. Raising the volume of his speech, he goes on, "And Sammy can watch Mary for a little while, can't ya Uncle Sam?"

Sam cringes at the unfortunate title. They're gonna have to address that at some point – he is sure as hell _not_ going to referred to as 'Uncle Sam.' Without looking at the couple, he replies, "I actively started blocking out everything you said after 'shower,' but fine, yeah, whatever!" Peering into Mary's vivid blue orbs, he drawls, "Your parents are so romantic, aren't they?"

"See? There ya go," says Dean, not having heard he's brother's sardonic aside. As his crowning flourish, he gives Claire that winning smirk he knows she can't resist, and she wonders why she ever even bothers to pretend she needs convincing.

What they don't see when they turn to walk down the hall, hand-in-hand, is Sam staring at their daughter with a pigment of melancholia shading his hazel eyes.

His wrists – connected to his hands, connected to his infant niece – still pulsate dully with that red-hot energy, and he _knows_, even now, that something is very wrong with him.

Maybe they won't have to address the Uncle Sam issue. Maybe they never will. Maybe he won't ever be around to hear her speak his name.

He does see the light, he does. It's beautiful and blinding and brimming with promise. And he's swimming towards it, but the closer he gets, the more he thinks _Maybe the light isn't meant for me_ – maybe he's just meant to lead everyone to it.

He said something once – nearly a decade ago, now – and he'd meant it with all his heart:

_You sacrifice everything for me. Don't you think I'd do the same for you?_

. . .

_**2 MONTHS LATER**_

Two months of relative calm have given the quartet a foreign taste of normalcy, and by now Sam and Dean are itching to get on with the next trial.

The only issue is Kevin.

They were well aware that he was struggling all along, but now he's convincing himself that Crowley is actually _there with him_, and this, both Sam and Dean recognize (from experience), is a bad sign.

So, they're heading to Missouri to sort him out and plus, he was going on about 'something' he needs to tell them, 'but can't say over the phone because Crowley might be listening.' Needless to say, they're hoping it has something to do with the trial.

"You ready?" Dean demands. The duffle strap is cutting into the wound-up muscles of his shoulder, and he shifts the bag to a more comfortable position.

Sam, on the other side of the library, is currently partaking in his new favorite hobby. Mary's tiny feet are lined up atop his massive ones, and her equally tiny hands are wrapped around his equally massive fingers as he guides her legs with his. The size difference between the two is quite the sight – she looks like a doll as he walks with her around the room.

"Yep," Sam replies distractedly.

Dean, momentarily forgoing his typical cheerlessness, can't help but crack a half-smile.

"You're leaving?" Claire's voice rouses him from his fleeting respite; the curve of his mouth evens out, unfurling into a straight, grim line.

"Yeah," the eldest Winchester confirms.

Sam sets Mary down in her playpen and she immediately begins to forage for toys. At almost ten months, she is bounding with as much vivacity as one would expect from the product of two hyper-spirited parents.

A cough bubbles in Sam's chest, and he snuffs it in the crook of his elbow.

Dean scrutinizes his brother critically.

"You sure?"

Ever since the first trial, Sam has developed a mysterious 'head cold,' as he refers to it. Dean is no fool – he knows there's more to it than that. While Sam used to get sick _constantly_ as a child (the flu, pneumonia, chickenpox – you name it), puberty bestowed upon him an ironclad immune system. Dean can't remember the last time his brother was sick as an adult, if he ever was.

So, the fact that this 'cough' coincides exactly with the completion of the first trial is, in fact, no coincidence.

What he doesn't know is that Sam has been bundling red-smeared tissues in layers of three or four clean ones, hoping desperately that no one will discover them in the trash bin.

The first time it happened, Sam had only felt a tickle in his throat, a minor irritation. He coughed to clear it and, when he went to wipe what he thought was saliva away from the corner of his mouth, the side of his thumb came back stained claret. It wasn't more than a drop, but he felt his insides twist in foreboding dread. He'd rubbed the red bead against his other hand, the color fading into his skin like a sanguine blush, and willed his racing heart to normalize.

The next time it happened, blood splattered the pristine, white Kleenex like an inkblot. He had studied the mark closely, trying to discern some greater significance in its shape. Ultimately, he decided it just looked like the rest of his life – full of meaningless bloodshed.

The third time, the coughing was entirely involuntary, and came from deep within his chest instead of his throat. He could feel the hot fluid rising in his lungs, and had hastily poured himself a glass of water to ward off what he knew was imminent. His efforts were to no avail, and blood dribbled into the crystal-clear liquid. He'd watched in mild horror as the tendrils of vibrant red became diluted, eventually dying the water a sickly ochre color. It wasn't more than a moment before he'd rushed to the sink and poured the glass down the drain, hacking up more evidence of his body's destroying itself and washing it away along with the turbid water. The image of a disturbing amount of blood, scraped from his own insides and painted on the sterile porcelain, is not something he will soon forget.

Now, the too-familiar mineral taste is perpetually coating his tongue. He's no stranger to the revolting feeling of thick, viscous blood slithering down the back of his throat, pooling in clots in his stomach. But the fact that he is only now swallowing his _own_ blood puts a whole new spin on how fucked-up he is.

This issue getting harder to hide, but he can tell when a particularly violent episode is coming on, at which point he always excuses himself.

That considered, the thought of being trapped alone with Dean for eight hours on the way to Missouri is nerve-racking. He knows his brother is already suspicious, knows he can always see through him. As it stands, it's a miracle he's managed to conceal the true gravity of his illness for so long – he probably has the distraction of Claire and Mary to thank for that.

Speaking of Claire, she is currently wound around his brother, her arms encircling his now-healed torso and his holding her in place. They regard one another in comfortable affection, not quite dazedly but not quite cogently, either, as though they're fighting against some charm or spell.

And Sam _sees_, sees something he thought he never would.

Dean is happy.

There are legions of worries wrestling within him, sure – there always are –, but he's _happy_.

This fills Sam's blood-suffused chest with secondhand happiness. Everyone always thought, out of the two of them,_ he _would be the one to transcend his 'hunter' destiny. And yet, in the end, it was Dean.

He wonders if he should feel jealousy, and why he doesn't.

He knows why he doesn't, deep down. It's because he stole Dean's entire life from him.

Not intentionally. Never intentionally. But the truth is the truth.

He thinks it's time his brother had something for himself, now, after all these years, something not related to _him_ or _Dad_ or _hunting_ – something his, wholly and truly.

Whatever happens to him at the end of these trials is going to be game-changing. Whether he dies or something else occurs, nothing is going to be the same for him – this he has confidence in. So he's glad he's the one this time, not Dean. He can afford to have his fate in flux – his brother can't. And he loves Claire and Mary well enough to make this notion sincere.

So when he says, "Yeah, I'm ready," he's telling the truth.

Green eyes rake over his face, glimmering with begrudging acceptance. Finally he allows, "Okay. Let's go."

And dammit, Sam thinks, Dean will let himself be John Winchester's fortunate son, just this once.

. . .

Dean pounds forcefully on the metal door of Fizzles' Folley, rattling the entire rusty deathtrap in the process.

"Kevin, open up!" he orders. When the kid doesn't immediately answer, he bashes his hand once more against the porthole, calling, "Kevin!"

Their jumpy AP prophet soon appears, a frying pan firmly secured in his fist.

"Whoa whoa, Jesus," Dean mutters, putting his hands up in surrender.

Kevin lowers his 'weapon,' and Dean mechanically steps past him and into the houseboat, assessing the site. "What's goin' on?" he starts. "What's with all the Crowley mumbo-jumbo?"

"He's… in my head," a jittery Kevin insists, still white-knuckling the frying pan. He looks just as bad as he usually does, sweaty with red-rimmed eyes and unkempt hair. He ostensibly hasn't gotten his hair trimmed since that fateful buzzcut so long ago, and his floppy black mane is making a reappearance, encroaching on his line of sight. He's also sprouting a peach-fuzz beard, which is a fairly new addition to his slovenly presence.

"In your head?" Sam repeats skeptically, all the while knowing he's in no position to pass judgment.

"Do you know what that means?!"

"Yeah, it means we needa up your anxiety meds," Dean quips. He pauses, half-regretting his insensitivity, before continuing, "Kevin, you're dreamin'. If Crowley knew where you were, he'd do a hellova lot more than mess with your head."

"You talked to Garth lately?" Sam interjects, thinking Kevin's sanity requires a lot more human-to-human contact and a lot less prophet-to-God contact.

"No – I – I think he's on a case? I dunno…"

"Okay, well, what'd you wanna tell us that you wouldn't say on the phone? And will you put the frying pan down? Jeez…" Crowley had never struck much fear into his heart, so he finds it a tad un-relatable that Kevin is so petrified of him – whatever happened in that brief interim when he was his captive must have been quite seminal.

Kevin sets the cooking utensil down on the stove with a loud _clank_ and slurs, "I translated the second trial from the tablet."

He then proceeds to walk past them, towards the center of the room, where bars of light are zigzagging across the floor and exposing a miasma of dust particles polluting the air.

"You-you crazy prophet, you, nice work!" Dean commends.

"And if Crowley's in my head he knows!"

"Okay, he's definitely not in your head, Kevin," the Winchesters say; although their words are out-of-sync, their tone is united, as though they're trying to convince a child to listen to them.

"Just-it's okay, we know you're stressed, just stay with us, alright?" Sam pleads, gazing at the boy intently. "What's the second trial?"

"An innocent soul has to be rescued from Hell and delivered unto Heaven," he says. His voice is pinched and nasally, as though he has a cold.

Both brothers are wearing unique looks of incredulity. Sam's eyes are wide and his features gently furrowed, while Dean is glaring out from under his creased brow. Sam's gaze darts around the room, while Dean's sears straight into Kevin's soul.

"What?" the older of the two demands blankly. His eyebrows jump as he speaks.

"Unto," Kevin reiterates. The circles beneath his eyes are even more evident as he faces the grimy window, the slanted light outlining the hollow of his eye sockets in charcoal-colored smudges. "That's how God talks," he explains.

"Rescue a soul from Hell? L-like actually go to Hell?" Sam seems very daunted by the prospect, and with good reason. "H-how do you get a soul 'unto' Heaven? How d'you even get a soul _out of Hell_?" he interrogates in rapid succession.

Dean's mouth is silently formulating a retort, and when Sam stops talking he replies, "We got in n' out of Purgatory once, the easy way. How much you wanna bet you can do the same thing with Hell?"

"A reaper?" Sam exclaims, "Dean, don't you remember how that ended?"

"Believe me, I remember," he growls dangerously, "But what's gotta be done has gotta be done. You got any other ideas? Far as I can see, making a demon-deal and damning your soul is the only other way to get in, and take it from me when I say that _definitely _ain't the way to go about it."

"So what, we find a reaper to smuggle us across the border? How do we do that?"

"Well, we're sure as hell not using Remy again, I can tell you that much. I'd say we're gonna have to consult an expert for that part."

. . .

By Dean's definition, 'consulting an expert' entails summoning and torturing a crossroads demon, who eventually gives them the name of a rogue reaper named Ajay. He'd begged them to kill him after divulging this information, citing that death was better than having to face Crowley after having ratted him out. He and his brother had been glad to oblige his request.

Again, Dean is somewhat perplexed. Sure, Crowley is an almighty asshole, but he only ever felt hatred towards that flamboyant dickhead, not fear.

He shakes this thought from his mind – it doesn't matter, anyway. Even if Crowley _does_ suddenly catch onto their scheme and decide to interfere, they've got ways of killing demons, even the King of Hell.

Ajay is stationed in St. Louis, as apparently rogue reapers are wont to congregate in cities.

The urban landscape at night has always made Dean feel a bit uncomfortable. It's not the grittiness that bothers him, but the sense of crowded isolation. There's something vastly disconcerting about being stranded amongst a horde of strangers, lost in an industrial maelstrom. He always preferred rural settings – at least if you're alone, you're _alone_.

The pitch-black street shines with cesspools, yellow streetlights reflecting off the murky water and bouncing a path down to the nearest intersection. Hot mist seeping through the manholes swirls together with smoky clouds of exhaust to form a disgusting haze, visible only between the lampposts and the pavement. It clogs their lungs, Sam's especially. Neon signs, red, blue, and purple burn tattoos on the otherwise inscrutable buildings, signaling strip clubs or pawnshops or 'massage parlors.'

A man they presume to be Ajay is leaning against a lemon-colored taxi, talking on the Bluetooth device jammed into his ear.

Dean wonders briefly if all reapers are self-involved douchebags.

"Ajay," he greets confidently, "Need to talk to you for a sec."

The swarthy man quickly removes his headset and observes, with vague surprise, "You know my name."

"And what you do," Sam adds. "We want to do business."

"But you are mortal – flesh and blood," he says, his deep-set gaze dragging over them disparagingly.

"But if we wanted to cross the border into Hell –"

"Visitor's pass," Dean finishes.

"No one wants to get into Hell," he tells them, snickering mirthlessly at their apparent stupidity.

Ignoring him, Sam asks, "But could a coyote like you do it?"

His features relax to something less withering as he considers the proposal.

"It's possible," he says eventually. "But I have special skills. I have overhead. It will be pricey."

"How pricey?" Dean snaps.

"You two are resourceful. One day, you will owe me a favor."

"You say that like you know us," Sam notes carefully, narrowing his eyes.

"Of course. You're the Winchesters," he replies with a grin.

Dean's eyebrows shoot up in an uncharacteristic display of shock. "Sorry. Have we met?"

"I am the reaper who took Bobby Singer to Hell."

Sam and Dean glance at one another, panic striking them to the core.

The younger Winchester makes a noise of disbelief. "Bobby in Hell? We burned his bones. Once we did that it was over, end of story."

"Hmm, not necessarily," Ajay replies nonchalantly.

"No no no, you see Bobby was on the good side of things, and good guys go to the penthouse," is Dean's firm refutation. He has his lips pulled into a fake, cocky smile designed to mask his horror; it doesn't reach any other part of his face.

"Mm, usually. Mostly. Depends on who you know, what palms get greased. If you're on the King of Hell's no-fly list, no way you cruise the friendly skies," he informs them dispassionately.

"Crowley," Dean rasps. He swallows, then nods to Sam – at least now they know which soul to deliver unto Heaven. He continues, "Okay. Let's do this. How much for two tickets down, three tickets back?"

"Dean," Sam warns.

"What?"

Sam grinds his jaw, baring his lower teeth. "C'mere," he breathes in exasperation.

Dean, all the while, doesn't seem to grasp the problem and stares at his brother raptly as he pulls him aside.

"What the hell are you thinking?" Sam hisses.

Dean, still not completely comprehending Sam's anger, nevertheless jumps into his brotherly quarrel mode. "You heard the guy, Bobby's in Hell?" the other retorts in an identical tone. "We're gonna spring 'im!"

"We've gone over this, Dean, I have to do the trials _solo_," he snarls.

"This is Bobby we're talkin' about, Sam," the other states gravely. Sam looks away, cornered, and Dean goes on, "Now let's face it, you haven't exactly been up to full speed lately, okay? We got one shot at this – we can't miss."

"I'm not gonna miss," he protests heatedly, devastated that his brother still doesn't trust him. With new resolve, he shows him Ruby's knife in his coat pocket. "I'll bring him back," he states, walking back over to Ajay.

"I'm in. Just me," he says.

Dean drags his feet as he rejoins the others.

"Follow me," says Ajay.

"Wait wait wait wait wait wait," Dean chants. "How does this work?"

"My understanding is that this is not your first time commissioning the talents of a reaper," he drawls.

Dean's expression hardens even more. "Yeah. And if you know that, you'll know the last one screwed us over. How d'we know you're not gonna do the same?"

"You have my word," he says in faux offense, pressing a hand to his chest.

"Not good enough."

He sighs. "Look, Remy is known as a skeeze even in the rogue reaper circles, which is something of a feat, really. I do have some professional integrity."

"How 'bout this," Dean starts, pulling his coat aside much like Sam had done only several moments earlier. Instead of Ruby's knife, his contains an Angel Blade. "You don't bring him back, I kill you."

Ajay eyes the weapon warily. "Very well," he allows.

"Good. So we've got a deal," Sam chimes in. "Same drill as before?"

"Yes, you have exactly twenty-four hours, then I will return for you." He nods to Sam, motioning for him to follow him into a nearby alleyway.

Dean lingers on the sidewalk and peers at his watch anxiously. "Goddammit," he mumbles to himself. There's nothing he hates more than not being in control of the situation.

Sam, meanwhile, finds himself deep behind the towering buildings. The alley walls are completely covered in multicolored graffiti – there's such an abundance of it that it's almost beautiful, and instead of tags there are images of life and death painted on the cinderblocks.

A nearby lamp – the only source of light – hangs directly over a picture of a sky-blue door, illuminating it.

"Take my hand," Ajay instructs, coming to stand directly in front of the 'door.'

"…and it gets creepier," Sam mutters.

Ajay doesn't reply to Sam's dry attempt at humor, instead focusing his attention on the door. Suddenly the ground begins to quake and the graffiti starts to melt inwards, funneling towards that one image.

Sam looks around wildly in trepidation and, before he has time to second-guess his decision, the door explodes in a flash of white.

* * *

**A/N: I know I've been going along with S8 quite a bit in these last few chapters, but I promise we'll start to diverge quite a bit pretty soon. I hope you all liked it. Thanks for reading, and please let me know what you think!**


	20. Knockin' On Heaven's Door

**A/N: Thank you so much to Lindsay, ImpalaLove, sarahmichellegellarfan1, and ToriDW317 for reviewing. You guys are awesome! I hope everyone likes this chapter.**

**Song: Knockin' On Heaven's Door by Bob Dylan**

* * *

**CHAPTER 20**

**Knockin' On Heaven's Door**

Dean's not sure what to do while he waits for Sam, but what he _is _sure about is that he's not going to move an inch until his brother is back on solid ground. So he books a room in the nearest motel (shocker – it's a shithole) and heads to the nearest bar (also a shithole).

A lot has changed in his life, yes, but this proclivity is ingrained in him. It's part of a hunter's DNA.

He's on his fifth whiskey, chest burning for one reason or another, when his phone starts to quake annoyingly against the beer-sticky bar top. He flips it over and reads the screen, seeing 'Kevin,' a simple name in innocuous lettering, displayed across the front.

"Kevin? Everything okay?"

What he hears on the other end of the line is a garbled mess of: "Dean, Crowley's here, he's gettingclose, Ican –"

"Whoa, dude," he cuts him off. "Slow down."

"He – he's coming, Dean, I –"

"Listen, we were just there with you – you're fine, I promise. Nothing's getting in that old boat, you understand me? I inspected it myself – it's airtight. So take a break. Watch some Casa Erotica – I left you volumes two through five. Just put the disc in your computer, chill out, and pour yourself a drink. Are you twenty-one yet? You know what, it doesn't matter because I left a six-pack there and you did good, so you deserve it. You're safe, Kev."

"No, Dean –"

"Look, Kevin, I'm a little busy with this second trial stuff at the moment," he writes off, studying at the amber-colored liquid in his half-empty glass. "You're fine. Trust me."

And he thinks he's telling the truth, he does. He means it when he says, 'You're safe,' thinks he's worthy when he says, 'Trust me.'

They say road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Both brothers are walking it.

. . .

Mary has just fallen asleep and Claire is opening a musty book about Sirens to the dog-eared page 83, when her phone starts rumbling on the mahogany desk. With a sigh, she recloses the text and treads over to the offending object.

"Hello?"

"C-Claire?"

"Yeah? Kevin?"

"Yeah, it's me… Um, I, um, I hate to bother you, but – uh – something is really wrong, and I think Crowley is coming after me and Dean doesn't believe me and –"

"What do you mean Dean doesn't believe you?" she disrupts his hysterical rambling.

"I tried explaining to him that Crowley is in my head and he's coming, he's going to kill me, and he doesn't believe me, he said I'm safe –"

"Okay, alright," she attempts to soothe.

"I'm sorry," he says a bit more slowly, "But I didn't have anyone else to call. What should I do?"

Claire bites her lip; she has no idea.

But he sounds loopy, sleepless, and terrified. She doesn't know Kevin all that well, but if she knows anything she knows this is an ill-fated mix.

"I'll call Dean," she tells him after a long pause. "I'll call you back, or have him call you – don't do anything rash."

"Okay," comes his gravelly response. He sounds small and broken.

"Okay," she echoes. She hangs up, her fingertips dancing across the touchscreen to dial Dean.

"Hello? Are you alright?" he demands at once.

"Have you talked to Kevin lately?"

She hears an irritated scoff fly through the phone, hitting her eardrum like a gust of wind. "He called you?"

"Yeah. He sounds bad, Dean."

"I was just there earlier today, I checked the place out myself. It's clean. He's just being paranoid, is all. The kid's all jacked up on caffeine and saturated fats – I told him to take it easy, eat a salad and get a good night's sleep."

"_Just_ caffeine and saturated fats?" she questions accusatorily, knowing anything that went into that safehouse went through Sam or Dean first.

"… I _may _have given him just a _teensy bit_ of Adderall, but he told me he stopped taking it," he admits guiltily.

"Jesus, Dean," she mutters, dragging her hand across her face. Once upon a time she might have been worried about smearing her makeup – oh how those days are long gone. After a sprawling silence, she says, "Can you go and check on him? Just to make sure – even if Crowley's not an issue, I'd hate to think…"

She can't see him, but Dean's features soften on the other end of the line. He mentally finishes her sentence: _… he'd do something to himself._

"I-I gotta be here for Sammy," he tells her, sounding strained. She can hear him take a sip of something, before continuing, "Claire, baby, you know that if I thought it was an issue I'd go straight there, no questions asked. But really, he'll be fine. The kid's squirrely, but he's not stupid."

"You should've moved him here…" she murmurs, shaking her head futilely.

"I'll tell ya what – once Sam gets back, I will."

"Alright," she forces out, albeit unhappily. "I'll talk to you later."

"See ya."

Claire sets her phone down on the table and stares at it purposefully as she toys her lower lip between her teeth. Her fingers drum against the wood, deliberate and methodical.

Soon she's calling Kevin.

"Claire?"

"Hey, Kevin. Any chance you can get to a car?"

. . .

_**FIVE HOURS EARLIER**_

"This isn't Hell!" Sam bursts out furiously when Ajay drops him in a sepia-toned woodland setting. He would recognize this place anywhere – he dreams about it at least once a week, after all.

They're in Purgatory.

"No," the reaper confesses, "but it's Hell-adjacent."

"This isn't what I paid for," he snarls venomously. "I booked the Hell tour."

"Whoa, whoa, Winchester, detach," Ajay takes a shot at placating him. "I've been down this highway many times before – follow the stream to where three trees meet as one. Where they meet, there are rocks. Between the rocks is the portal."

"Portal?"

"A back door to Hell, if you will. Trust me – it'll work," he says like a cheap salesman.

"Wait," he stops him incredulously. "So you're not coming with me?"

"Don't be ridiculous! Smuggling a mortal across the border is risky enough. But gate-crashing a Winchester into Hell seriously blows," he replies. "No. Like I said, I'll be back in twenty-four hours precisely. Be here."

Without further notice, a surge of white similar to the one that brought them here swallows up Ajay, and Sam is left entirely to his own devices.

His breathing becomes labored as he absorbs his surroundings. Staunchly repressed memories dig themselves out of their graves, clawing at the walls of his concentration like bloodthirsty zombies.

_No_, he thinks. Remember the light.

He takes Ruby's knife, marks the nearest tree.

And Sam starts to follow the stream.

. . .

_**NOW**_

Dean is in the bathroom when he gets the call, bowlegs framing a disgusting urinal. Something vibrates against his thigh.

He zips his fly and digs his phone out of his jeans.

'Claire,' it tells him.

It's late. She should be asleep by now. He answers it, telling himself, Put your fears to rest.

"Hello?"

"Hiya there, Clyde."

And now: _Wake up_, he thinks, _WAKE UP_.

But he doesn't.

And just like that, the world stops turning. His blood stops moving. His nerves stop working.

His ears start ringing.

"You there, Daddy-o?"

Dean's tongue is thick and dry, like cotton wrapped around a slab of meat. For some unknown reason, he turns his eyes up, towards the sky, and his mind is running, _why? Why why why why why? Why do you have to do this to me? Why? Why me? Why is it always me?_

All he sees is a tube of fluorescent light, bottled and buzzing, buzzing like the dead flies that are trapped inside used to.

He suddenly feels sick. The room is too bright. The smell is vile. He thinks he might vomit.

"Gee, if I'd known it was going to be so dramatic I would've broken the news in person," Crowley laments. "Now, you've been quite the _busy, _busy bee since we last spoke. I think it's time we have a chat, don't you? Lots to discuss."

He takes it all back, he takes everything back about not being scared of Crowley. He takes it back.

Right now, Crowley is the scariest motherfucker on the face of the planet. Scarier than Lucifer ever was, a shit-ton scarier than Dick Roman, scarier than life was when he was four and his mother was barbequed on the ceiling.

Crowley is scariest thing in the world.

"I swear to god, Crowley," he starts, trying-and-failing not to let his voice falter, "if you so much as harm one hair on their fucking heads –"

"Idle threats don't suit you, Dean," he hums. "Come now. Let's have a _tête-a-tête _and discuss my terms. I must admit, it's a bit thrilling to be the legendary Winchesters' big-bad, for once."

"Where are you."

"Maine," he sing-songs. "You've got – hmm let's say twelve hours, shall we? Plenty of time to hop on a jet plane."

"Where in Maine."

"I think you know." He can hear the smug leer in his voice. Then the line cuts out.

Dean doesn't remember vaulting across the bathroom. He doesn't remember retching into the sink, doesn't remember punching through the mirror, doesn't even remember the syrupy blood dripping hot streaks down his knuckles.

What he remembers instead is everything he ever loved slipping through his fingers.

. . .

It's late afternoon when Dean arrives in Maine.

He finally figured out how to overcome his fear of flying – drown it heart-stopping terror of another kind. Can you imagine? Suspended in steel helplessness, feeling like you're in a coffin, all the while knowing your family is relying on you to save them. Moving so fast, so high up, so removed, and at the same time just standing still. Staring at the back of someone's head, at the back of someone's seat. They don't know what's happening. They're happy. They're fine. The Earth is still on its axis for them.

Somewhere, a baby whimpers. Somewhere else, a woman laughs.

He looks up at the plastic dials. Stale air blows into his face, pretending it's something it's not. He sees the flight attendant call button, too close within his reach. _Push it. Push it. Somebody help me._

If the plane had crashed, he would have been grateful.

He leaves the airport in Portland, looks for a car (his only criteria being 'easy to steal'), and heads up to the 100-mile Wilderness. He feels his quad tingle as he stomps the accelerator. He _loses_ feeling in his hands as he grips the steering wheel. His knuckles don't blanche. They stay purple and raw, bruised and scraped. Small shards of glass that he never bothered to pick out grind a channel towards his bones. It's painless.

Outside, sunlight is bleeding through the gauzy clouds. It flows through the windshield, stinging Dean's already-mistreated eyes.

He tries to stare at it. He's not sure why.

Part of him wants to keep looking until it burns him blind, so he can remember at least some brightness before this moment. But his body won't let him; biology thwarts this natural sort of self-mutilation, stops him from losing his sight and losing his path on the road.

When he looks away and the translucent spots clear his vision, all he's left with is the Technicolor blackness of his own life.

Dean can't put the details together exactly. He can't pinpoint the precise moment reality started to unravel, or how it happened, or the extent of the wreckage. But any way he fits the pieces together – even in a best-case scenario – spells out capital B-A-D.

He doesn't know what he's going to find, who's going to be dead, who's going to be alive.

He doesn't know if he's ever going to leave the forest, if – if he lives – if he'll even have the strength to. So many ifs.

He reaches the edge of the trees, half-recognizing the trail. He breathes in, can't seem to get enough air. His head is spinning, dizzy, whirling. A crisp breeze inflates his lungs, to no avail; it's like trying to pump air into a flat tire. There's just no point.

Maybe it's the altitude. Maybe it's his organs mutinying.

He sees a path in the dirt, tapering off into the underbrush.

He sees a path in his life, tapering off into damnation.

. . .

The sun has been slogged down beyond the horizon by the time he gets to the clearing, which he recognizes with certitude as _the_ clearing.

The moon hangs over him, full and bounding with potential, scythed in half by jagged treetops.

Dean waves his flashlight around, doesn't see anything.

Until he sees Sam.

The brunette rushes towards his older brother, dimpled grin spread wide across his face, and for a moment Dean thinks perhaps he's the one who had a psychotic break this time, perhaps he imagined the whole nightmare.

"I did it, Dean," he exclaims, yanking his shell-shocked sibling into an embrace. It's dark. He can't see the rings around his eyes, or the ashen film of sweat clinging to his forehead. His voice is rough, but pleased. "I got Bobby topside!"

Dean is frozen. Uncertain. Unbelieving. Uncomprehending.

"Well? Don't you have anything to say?" His little brother's puppy-dog eyes (_now_, he sees, pop out against a backdrop of red) are wide and thirsty for praise, same as they were when he was four and came home from school with a macaroni sculpture.

"H-how?"

"Well, surprise surprise, Ajay fucked us over. But I knew from before, knew where the door back might be – like you said, I followed the river. I followed it, Dean, and I did it!"

"B-"

Before the word can surface, a slow clap resounds through the woods.

"Bravo," comes Crowley's cockney accent, repurposing Dean's orphaned 'b-'.

"Crowley? What the hell?"

Sam says this, and that's when he notices something is wrong with his brother – he expected a 'You're gonna get it now, you son of a bitch,' or a 'Bad move, asshat,' or something along these lines. But Dean's face is just blank. No frown, no seething grimace. Just… empty.

Sam doesn't take much time to consider this as he lunges towards Crowley, wielding Ruby's knife.

"Really?" Crowley says with a half-affronted, half-amused smirk. He flicks his finger and throws both of them back against two wide, solid tree trunks. The bark pricks them even through their clothes.

"You wanna tell him, or shall I?" the squat Brit addresses Dean, one eyebrow cocked.

Only now does Dean's face transform into a look of utter loathing.

"I guess I'll take that as a _shall I_," Crowley muses. "Listen up, Moose. You and your partner in tomfoolery are going to put a stop to whatever it is you're doing. I'm not quite sure what that is, exactly, but I'm certain you're up to no good. One of my precious pooches is dead, and now you're breaking into _my _Hell? Did you really think I wouldn't notice?"

"Tough shit, Crowley," Sam spits, "You're too late. It's almost over."

"Ah," says Crowley, pacing merrily and raising his index finger. "You see, that's neither here nor there. You're going to end your mysterious little quest, or _I'm_ going to end your little prophets."

"What?" Sam croaks out. He looks at Dean, who's closed his eyes. As though not-seeing Crowley will make a difference. As though he can will it all to stop, if he just closes his eyes and makes a wish.

Sam has never witnessed his brother react to danger like this, not even when they were young. _Especially_ not when they were young.

"That's right, boys. What we've got here is a good, old-fashioned ransom situation. You stop. You bring me the Demon Tablet. You get your prophets back. Simple."

The younger Winchester opens his mouth like a fish gasping for breath, but Crowley goes on, "It's overly generous, I know. I really should just kill them. But what can I say? They've grown on me. The pets that nipped always were my favorites – never cared much for the simpering ones…"

"Y-you have Kevin?" he questions.

"And your beloved Claire," he states with a catlike grin. He casts his attention to Dean, for the first time, and says, "Oh don't look so green, Squirrel. I don't have your bundle of joy. Lilith always had a penchant for stealing babies, but that was never my thing. Frankly, I find them repulsive. So many bodily fluids –"

"You know about that?" Sam interrupts frantically.

"You didn't actually think a bloody _prophet_ and a Winchester could procreate and no one would find out about it, did you? Christ, you two are dense…"

"If you've got Kevin," Dean's voice, hoarse with distress and disuse, grinds out, "then you've got the Demon Tablet. We don't have anything to trade."

"You see, _no_. Imagine my surprise, finally getting my hands on that spry little devil and discovering that he is _not_, in fact, in possession of the Tablet."

"Well, we don't know where it is, then!" Dean shouts, the words cracking.

"You think I believe that? Now now, like Ajay said before I drove an Angel Blade through his kidney – you two are resourceful. I trust you'll be able to figure it out. When should your deadline be? I think a week is fair, don't you?"

Before either can respond, Crowley snaps his fingers. All at once the brothers fall to the detritus floor and the King of Hell vanishes.

"Shit, Dean, did you know – how?" Sam can hardly control the words that are pouring from his mouth. He stares at his brother in bewildered anguish.

"I knew," he states gravely. "I dunno how. But he called me, first."

"What're we –"

"We're gonna find the Tablet, and we're gonna give it to him."

"But – but I already finished the second trial – I said the spell and everything – we're so close –"

"We're gonna give him the Tablet," he repeats, deadpan.

Sam's body slumps. He scours his mind, sees no other way. "Okay," he relents. "Okay."

And then something happens. Sam's forearm glows reddish orange like a star, like his body is smoldering from the inside out. He winces in pain, clutching the affected region.

He sinks to his knees.

And the whole world sinks with him.

* * *

**A/N: I might come back to this later and edit it a little bit because I wrote it really quickly, but I hope you enjoyed it. There are a lot of details that need filling-in, but don't worry, we'll get to that! I didn't go along with the show as much as usual because, well, you guys know what happens, so I wanted to approach it from another angle. I hope it's okay. Pretty please let me know what you think!**


	21. Gimme Shelter: Part 1

**A/N: Thank you so so so much to RainbowSkies (I'm so thrilled you decided to let me know you've been reading!), ImpalaLove, sarahmichellegellarfan1, and Lindsay for reviewing! You guys are amazing and I hope you all enjoy this chapter.**

**Song: Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones**

* * *

**CHAPTER 21**

**Gimme Shelter: Part 1**

For most of his life, Dean had thought his life was hanging together by a thread.

He had thought wrong.

_Now_, his life is hanging together by a thread.

This is the state of his affairs:

1) The mother of his child has been kidnapped.

2) The person required to bring down their adversary has also been kidnapped.

3) His brother is being destroyed by some unidentifiable malady.

4) He must find a slab of rock hidden in a crazed frenzy by (2), and he has _no idea_ where to even start looking.

5) The one person with the juice to help him is dead.

6) He is a ten-month-old's sole guardian.

He could almost laugh. His situation is so hopeless it's ridiculous, it's a joke. Good one, universe, good one, he thinks. You really got me this time. If only Dad could see me now. The oldest Winchester left alive, sealing the fates of all the others. It's not a cycle. It's a curse. It's inevitable, a force of nature, as sure a thing as the sunset.

So much for trying to close the Gates of Hell – now he's just trying to stay afloat.

Dean's brain somehow devises a plan: get Sam back to the bunker, where it's safe, where Mary ostensibly remains _(alone?!)_, and figure out what the hell happened.

The Impala's gonna have to sit at the Lambert–St. Louis International Airport for a little while longer.

Back in Kansas, Dean drag/carries Sam through the threshold of their failed fortress, sets him down in the nearest chair, and immediately searches for Mary.

He finds her; he also finds Jody Mills.

"Jody?!"

"Dean," she says calmly. Mary, ethereally blonde, is cradled in her arms, content and unharmed. "Where's Claire?"

"S-s-she's not here." His stammer might have embarrassed him once. Once. The gears in his mind rotate, unhinged, trying to process what's happened. "Did she let you in?"

"Yeah," she says cautiously. "She called me – said it was an emergency. When I got here she left and told me she would be right back – it's been nearly a day! Please tell me everything is all right…"

"It's not," he says. "It's not at all."

Jody sinks into the armchair in the corner of the nursery.

Dean plucks his daughter from her. His eyes flutter shut, briefly. He rocks back and forth. Relief is bursting through the seams of his soul.

"What happened?" Jody demands. "Where is she?"

"She was taken hostage."

"What?! By who?!"

"The King of Hell."

"Th-the King of Hell – _what_?"

"I know. It's just as crazy as it sounds, believe me. But I've got it under control," he lies through his teeth. Hearing the words leave his own mouth, he only feels more desperate.

"What do you mean 'under control'?" she grills, narrowing her eyes.

"We – Sam and I – we've got a plan. We're gonna give him what he wants, and he'll give us back Claire."

"You're really negotiating with him?"

"We're not the US government, Jody. Times like this? Yeah, we negotiate with terrorists."

"But-but what I mean is… you trust him to let her go? I wouldn't picture the King of Hell as the honest sort."

"This guy's got a track-record of keeping deals, let's just put it that way," he replies cryptically.

She questions after a moment, "W-what can I do to help?"

The muscle in Dean's jaw contracts visibly as he observes his daughter, who is so, so precious to him.

How has this happened? How has this become his life? _(Where did I get lost?)._

If Sam is his Achilles' heel, she is his heart, defenseless and delicate and too easily demolished. Achilles' heel was a small target – fatal, sure, but hard to strike. His heart? Not so much.

He doesn't want to ask this of Jody, doesn't want to drag _yet another_ innocent person into this. But he has to.

"Can you stay here and watch her while Sam and I figure this out?"

"Of course," she answers immediately.

"They're not gonna need you at the police department?"

"I already called in. Told them it was a family emergency. I can stay as long as you need me."

Dean smiles, but still looks miserable. "Thanks," he offers.

Mary securely in his arms (_Don't let go. Never let go_), he heads into the center of the bunker, where Sam is.

"How're you feeling?"

Sam sniffs, wipes blood from his mouth. He deludes himself that Dean didn't see.

He states, "I'm fine."

"No, you're not."

"I will be," he amends. "When this is over. I will be."

"It will _never_ be over, Sam. Once we give Crowley the Tablet, that's it. We're not getting it back."

"You don't know that –"

"I do! I _do _know that!" he cries. Mary's lower lip trembles at the hike in volume, and he strokes her wispy hair, feeling it slide like silk beneath the etchings of his fingerprints. More softly, he hisses, "You wanna know _how_ I know that? Because we're not gonna go after it! And you know what we do now? We get Claire and Kevin back, and after that we keep our heads down."

"_Dean_," Sam implores, eyebrows creeping together. "This – this isn't you, this doesn't sound like you." (_Don't break, Dean, don't break. I need you_)_._

It always used to be Dean saying, _You're all I've got_. Now it's reversed. It's reversed. _Where is my brother, _he thinks, where did he go? This is someone else, someone different. Dean Winchester doesn't just _give up_.

"We can't be reckless like this anymore, Sam," he says, looking wildly around the room. His voice quivers. He can see he's hurting him, hurting everyone, hurting himself. (_This is all your fau- No. There's no time for that now_). He says, "You said that, once. You were right. We can't."

Sam hears, _I won't._

Both brothers are silent for a long time, miles away from one another.

_Why? _still ricochets around in Dean's skull. Why is he the one who has to take control, who has to lead all these people – all these fragile parts of himself – into danger? Why is he the one responsible? Why is it all on him?

Dean says, "What we were gonna do – we were gonna go in, get the trials done, and get out – all under the radar, or at least do it knowing Claire and Mary were _safe_. Well, that plan's been blown to shit. Now… now we have to worry about staying _alive_. You're sick, Sam. We need to find them, then focus on getting you better."

Sam, still sitting, peers up at his older brother. His eyes swim with emotion; his pupils are drowning in it, irises, grayish, at the moment, like the color of a tempestuous sea, swallowing them up. His gaze then flits six inches to the right, to his niece.

She is entirely uncorrupted. Her cornflower-blue eyes meet his roiling ones, expressionless, a blank canvas of possibilities and opportunities and _life_. She has no conception of demon-deals, of coming back from the dead, of leaving bits of yourself behind each and every time.

Understanding dawns on him, helps him beat down the blood lapping at the membrane of his esophagus. It was always _Sam and Dean Sam and Dean Sam and Dean_, but now it's bigger than that. Dean's not doing this for Sam, Sam's not doing this for Dean.

"Where do we start?"

. . .

Claire's vision wobbles as she carefully opens her eyes, and she thinks to herself that this has happened two too many times.

She's tied to a chair. There was no illusion of darkness, this time, because it's actually dark and she is not blindfolded. She tries to move her hands, testing the limits of her confines. The knots are tight. The rope fibers are already burrowing into her flesh. She can feel abrasions blossoming on her fair skin, an itchy sort of pain encircling her wrists and ankles.

"Awesome…" she mutters sullenly.

She's surprised to hear someone respond with: "This seriously blows."

"Kevin?" She squints her eyes and, as they adjust, she makes out the faint silhouette of someone else nearby.

What she also makes out is that they are in something akin to a dungeon; the walls and floor are made of concrete, slick and mossy and sure to be cultivating some sort of dangerous black mold or fungus. And the _smell_ – it reeks of sewage. It wafts from the ground and from the ceiling, barrages them from every angle, making it impossible to tell its origin. Claire breathes in and gags instantaneously, her body protesting against it.

Still, the stench gives her a clue as to where they are. Underground, apparently, and probably somewhere near a drainage pipe. They're not in the sewer, but perhaps they are close.

The only semblance of illumination comes in the form of a sliver of yellow peeking through the boarded-up window. Right now, it cuts a thin line across her forehead. She can't see it, obviously, but she can feel it searing her aching head in half. From the positioning it appears to be morning.

"I should have seen this coming," is Kevin's forlorn grievance. "I knew he was on to me…"

"At least he doesn't have the Tablet," she murmurs, struggling to find a silver lining. They're still alive, at least, and if they're still alive she wagers Crowley isn't intent on killing them.

"Yeah, I guess… Claire, I'm so sorry, this is all my fault – I should have just listened to Dean and stayed inside…"

He's right, but Claire doesn't want to say so, because it would mean admitting that she is culpable, too. "It's okay, Kevin," she sighs, not really meaning it. "You were scared, so you ran – most people would've done the same."

"Yeah, but the only reason you're here is because you were trying to help me," he says. A slight whine of remorse constricts the pitch of his voice.

"I'm sure Dean and Sam are looking for a way to get us out as we speak," she says, trying to assuage her own anxiousness as much as his. And she is, she is sure. She's just _not _sure how successful they will be.

_What was I thinking?_ It was stupid. She knows it was stupid. But Kevin was going to act whether she helped him or not, and she supposes she has a weakness for struggling teens.

And back, back in the very _back_ of her mind, she has to admit she's missed being involved in all this. Since Mary was born she has, understandably, been benched – but she would be lying if she said she didn't miss it just a _little. _What 'it' is, exactly, is more abstract. It's everything she doesn't want to admit to enjoying, but does. It's the hunting, the adrenaline rush, the feeling that she's part of something more than just her own measly life.

She used to connect with Dean and Sam on this level. _She_ used to be the prophet, the essential one, the one who could help. Now… Now she's just a cripple, a liability. And she wanted to prove to herself and everyone else that she wasn't, but she _is._

And that's why it was stupid. Because _of course_ she was wrong and _of course _she's a liability and _of course_ it was incredibly self-centered to put herself in harm's way. She has a daughter to care for, for God's sakes. That's why she's out of the game. That's why she has to be.

She never imagined she'd miss the visions – _never. _They tore at her brain like piranhas and for as long as she had them she'd wished they would stop. So imagine her chagrin. Real fucking ironic, she thinks.

It's not that she wants them back, not exactly. But she thinks about it constantly, she wonders what happened. _Why_ did they stop? Why? Now she wishes she could pray and someone would answer her like they used to, wishes Castiel would float down from Heaven and tell her where it all went wrong, where she lost herself for a third time.

But Castiel is dead, and she's not a prophet anymore.

Who am I? she thinks, who am I really? Not a small-town bartender, not a prophet, not even a good mother. Just when she settles into one identity, it's ripped away from her, tearing a schism in her soul.

Sitting here now, bound in the dark, she can only think she's just… a weak has-been who causes the people she loves unnecessary heartache, who tries to help and only makes things worse.

She imagines Dean is livid, and he has every right to be. At least she had the good sense not to take Mary with her when she went to meet Kevin at the halfway point.

All she can do now is pray he'll be able to clean up her mess.

. . .

Dean is not in fact livid, but his emotions are muddled. Of course, he's tremendously relieved that Mary is safe. The thought of Crowley with his vulnerable daughter had made him feel physically ill, to the point of debilitation. He may not have been able to fight through his pain.

Now that this crushing stress has been removed, he is more focused, more driven.

Still, though, everything has gone to shit. Claire has been kidnapped and Sam appears to be dying. No one's admitting it – no one's addressing it. Lord knows Sam's not gonna say anything about it, and Dean doesn't say anything, either, because he can't deal with it. He just can't. Not now. Not yet.

He's not blind and he's brought it up, but Dean is nothing if not persistent and even though every cell in his body is begging to push the issue, he knows he can't, for the sake of his own sanity. He needs to be sharp if he's gonna get Claire and Kevin back.

So he forces himself to stare straight ahead when he hears Sam hacking, coughs spilling from his chest with violent, lethal force. _Don't look_, he coaches himself. Just don't look. Bloody tissues pile up in towers next to his baby brother, and he just stares at the wall.

In any case, the amount of effort Sam is putting into appearing healthy is admirable. He's shaky, pale, and feverish, but still he puts on a valiant show, modulates his voice not to falter while he helps his brother figure out where their lost prophets might be.

It's been a while since they've done any detective work like this, come to think of it.

They start by filling in the blanks – if Claire had the foresight to call Jody, it means her leaving was premeditated and she had hours to spare while she waited for the sheriff to make the drive all the way down from South Dakota.

The best they can guess is that Kevin decided to drive to Kansas and Claire agreed to meet him somewhere in the middle. By mapping out the routes they would have taken and applying a rough timeline, they are able to approximate where Claire and Kevin actually met each other.

From there, they have to assume that Kevin hid the tablet _before_, he met up with Claire, since he didn't have it on him when Crowley captured them. So – that gives them at least a hazy concept of where he might have hidden the Demon Tablet.

That said, it's still a huge geographical range, even assuming Kevin hid it directly on his way.

"We should drive Kevin's route," Dean announces after examining the map they have plotted.

Sam twists his lip into an approving expression. He's impressed with the fact that they were able to piece the events together, and has to admit that Dean was actually responsible for the majority of the deductive leaps – it's tragic, he thinks, that his brother is so utterly unaware (or, alternatively, in denial) of his own intelligence.

"Okay," the younger Winchester agrees. "You're thinking we look for possible hiding spots along the way?"

"Yep. I think we've done all that we can here."

He hates staying in the bunker, all the while knowing that Claire and Kevin are out there _somewhere_, in god-knows what condition, probably scared out of their minds. Dean detests inactivity with every inch of his body. His blood screams at him to take action, his pulse thumps rapidly in his fingertips. He's holding a pencil and it feels alien, absurd, surreal. His fingers itch to curl around the familiar hilt of a dagger or the trigger of a gun.

Dean loads his infirm brother into the car they stole and together they set out to undo months' worth of progress.

. . .

It's the afternoon, now, and Claire can tell because the thin line of sun has gravitated to cut directly into her eyes. The light impales her retinas, blinds her anew.

Kevin, his back to the window, can't see anything but her eyes. It's odd – her entire body is cloaked in the shadows, apart from this one section of her face. Her pinprick irises are the only things marring the sparkling expanse of blue gleaming through the darkness.

"How did you get away the last time?" she demands, continuing their long-winded discussion on how to get out of this. They've been here for hours, and neither Crowley nor any of his minions has made an appearance, which she finds strange – Crowley is nothing if not theatrical.

"It was a spell that required a ton of rare ingredients, and I don't think they're going to make the mistake of delivering them to me again," he informs her wryly.

"The Demon Tablet didn't say _anything_ useful?" she asks, finding this a little incredible.

"I dunno, I was a too busy trying to translate your stupid trials to read ahead," he shoots back.

By now they're both, understandably, a little irritable – being tied to a chair all day will do that to you. They're parched, starving, and in need of a restroom.

All of a sudden, the green-stained metal door behind Claire begins to creak open. She tries to incline her head so she can see over he shoulder, but to no avail – it's only Kevin's half-terrified and half-furious "_Crowley_" that alerts her to the dungeon's new addition.

Crowley rolls his eyes, daintily side-stepping a stagnant puddle to stand between his two captives. "I see incarceration has made you no less perceptive, Kevin," he drawls leisurely. In a more engaged tone, he goes on, "Tell me more about these 'trials.'"

"You've been listening?!" Claire seethes.

Again, Crowley rolls his eyes and clasps his hands behind his back. "Really, I never cease to wonder how you lot have survived for so long. You're mindless, but remarkably durable. Like… cockroaches. Just when I think I've got you, you scurry out from beneath my boot and vanish behind the radiator." He grins forebodingly, raising his index finger. "But not this time. I've had to listen to your ridiculous – albeit creative, I must admit – escape strategies all day, and now finally you've gotten to the good part. So please, enlighten me before I squish you."

"You're not going to kill us," she challenges, "or else you would have already."

Still smiling, he retorts, "So confident, are you?" He flicks his wrist, and her chair screeches across the floor, coming to collide harshly with the far wall. Her body recoils on impact, causing her head to smash into the slimy concrete with a sickening _crack_. All at once Kevin shouts her name and she feels pain ignite through her brain. She un-scrunches her eyes, and the images of Kevin and Crowley are decidedly blurry. Yep, she thinks. Definitely concussed, if not worse. She's sure that if she were able to place her hand at the base of her skull as she so desperately wishes to, it would come back bloody.

"Now," – he turns to Kevin jauntily – "these trials…"

"What does it matter," the teen spits back with unprecedented vigor, "it's over now, anyway."

"I don't like to be out of the loop," he states matter-of-factly.

"They're never going to find that Tablet, you know," he goes on, still not answering the question. "I hid it – there's no way you're getting your hands on it."

"You'd better hope for your own sakes that's not true," he says with pseudo-compassion. "'That Tablet' is the only thing keeping you alive."

Claire's head is throbbing, and she's bleary-eyed and mildly afraid she's suffered permanent damage. She's having a difficult time stringing words together in a way that makes sense, but eventually manages, "So… you're _not_… going to kill us."

Crowley looks faintly impressed that's she still has the spunk to refute him. "_You're _trying my patience, love. Your little sassy-redheaded-spitfire routine may take well in some circles, but not this one. Kevin here – he's the only one who can read the Tablet, after all – it wouldn't be prudent to kill him, not yet anyway. But _you_… Well, I hate to be so indelicate, but you're expendable. I could kill you now, and your dear Clyde would be none the wiser and still deliver the Tablet directly to my doorstep."

"You could," she grinds out, "but you made a deal."

At this, Crowley appears ruffled. "I'm King of Hell," he asserts, contrary to his new, more serious demeanor. "King of the Crossroads is just… a subtitle, if you will."

Still, through her mental fogginess, Claire's eyes glint knowingly.

Crowley is incensed. He might as well kill her, he thinks. He can. He wants to. Why shouldn't he?

But he doesn't, instead glowering dangerously at younger prophet. "If you don't tell me what these trials are, I pop her head off and use it to decorate my next Christmas tree. Do you really want that blood on your hands, Kevin? The only reason she's here is because she was trying to assist _you_, after all."

Kevin gulps, not quite sure what to believe. Claire tries to fashion her expression into one that will urge him not to cave to Crowley's demands, but she doesn't think he can see her.

"Th-the trials," he starts, "they were meant to close Hell."

Her heart sinks in her chest. _Dammit Kevin_, she thinks but does not say. She's fairly certain another run-in with the wall will kill her.

"What do you mean _'close Hell'_?" he questions skeptically.

"Close the Gates."

"How many of these trials are there?" is the King of Hell's next blunt interrogation. It's unsettling, seeing him forgo his customary blithe loquacity.

"Three."

"What's the third?"

"I don't know," Kevin admits sincerely. "I didn't get that far."

"Liar," he sneers.

"I'm not lying!" he insists as Crowley edges towards him.

More calmly, the demon reasons, "So these trials – the dynamic duo has already accomplished two?"

Kevin bites his lip and nods.

Crowley exhales deeply, screwing his eyes shut and pinching the bridge of his nose in agitation. "Bloody imbeciles," he mutters. With renewed animation, his eyes spring open and he says, "Right. Well. Thank _heavens_ they won't be completing a third."

Both prophets remain silent, praying this is not indeed the truth.


	22. Gimme Shelter: Part 2

**A/N: Thank you so much to cheer11lindsay, ImpalaLove, and sarahmichellegellarfan1 for reviewing the last chapter! I appreciate the support more than I can even say! I hope you all enjoy this chapter!**

**Song: Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones**

* * *

**CHAPTER 22**

**Gimme Shelter: Part 2**

Running a triangle between Missouri, Maine, Kansas, and then back to Missouri again has been taxing. Sam is in need of some TLC, which cramming his gangly body repeatedly into a too-narrow Nissan Altima and feeding him fast food is most definitely not providing.

If nothing else, though, the trip back to Missouri gives them a chance to pick up Dean's Baby, and consequently ease back into some sad facsimile of a routine. Just Sam and Dean, in the Impala, piecing together a mystery.

Just like old times.

That is, if you don't think about whom they're trying to find, what's going on in the next state over, or what's happening to Sam. And Dean doesn't – he doesn't think about these things, because if he does he can't function. And he _needs _to be able to function, needs to more than anything.

Because he's the only one left who can.

So, when Sam coughs he turns up the radio. When Sam dozes off he fights the urge to mop the sweat from his brow. _Pretend pretend pretend. _Dean's been pretending for such a large portion of his life, it shouldn't be this hard.

When they arrive at Garth's houseboat, there's no secret knock, no delivery of Farmer's Market produce. There's only Dean bundling his flannel around his fist and punching through the starboard window.

They shimmy through the glass-barbed porthole, Dean first so he can help his brother. Sam's shoulders are broad and at risk of catching on the pointed shards, but Dean maneuvers him fastidiously.

"I'm fine, I'm fine," he recites needlessly. Who's he fooling? Who's he fooling _really_?

Dean is undeterred. He acts as though he can't hear him, as though he can't see what used to be his entire world deteriorating before his very eyes, sucked into a black hole that's beyond his comprehension. He helps him down, steady and sturdy as always, feeling his brother's hand tremble and convincing himself he doesn't.

Sam's large form seems like it should add stability, but in reality it only makes his teetering more worrisome. Seeing someone like him – someone so young and vital and strong – waver on their feet is disconcerting, like watching a three-hundred-year-old, termite-infested redwood fall to the forest floor. It makes you question everything, makes you reconsider all you take for granted. If he's not stable, what is?

Kevin's workspace is more or less indecipherable. The Winchesters don't really know what they're even looking at, let alone what's of import. Some things have clearly been disturbed intentionally, while others – like the sheets of paper littering the deplorable floor – look as though they were forgotten in the flurry of the young prophet's desertion.

"Where's his computer?" Sam asks at once.

"He must've taken it with him," Dean reasons.

Sam presses his lips together so tightly they might fuse into one mass, his eyes sweeping over the room with urgency. Kevin is smart. Kevin wouldn't leave them in the lurch like this, especially not if he knew he was taking such a monumental risk.

He zeroes in on something creating a small slope in a stack of papers, something concealed in the haphazard chaos.

"What's that?" he questions, pointing.

Dean lifts his brows at his brother's astute observation, yellow-flecked eyes training in on the indicated spot. He casts Sam one last, unreadable glance, before shuffling over to the desk and rummaging through the papers.

He finds a USB drive. Sam's glassy eyes light up, a striving lucidity cutting through the glaze.

"You got your laptop?" Dean asks.

Sam nods enthusiastically. "It's in the car, in my backpack."

"Alright," Dean says, modulating his voice not to sound optimistic. It's not difficult. He's drilled himself well, taught himself how to keep his emotions out at bay. "Let's go."

. . .

Claire and Kevin have been untied, now, and are free to roam their putrid prison.

Neither of them is in particularly good shape. Claire's hair is matted with a crust of blood at the base of her head, and her lip is busted from when Crowley's henchman slapped her when he delivered their dinner and she talked back.

Kevin's left cheekbone is black-and-blue from when he attempted to defend his prophetical compatriot, and his knees are abraded from when the blow sent him bounding to the scummy floor. He silently thanks God he's up-to-date on his tetanus shots.

"We've gotta get out of here," Claire hisses. She is vigilant to keep her voice down now that they know Crowley is listening.

"I know," Kevin assents, equally muted. His beady eyes skitter around the room, appraising their surroundings. He quickly surmises that they don't have a lot to work with, the typical demon-averse trappings now far beyond their reach. No salt, no holy water, no Kurdish knife, no Colt.

_But_, he realizes with a start, maybe they don't need any of those things – maybe they only need their own brains. And maybe that's where they've fucked up every other time.

He has an idea.

. . .

"Sam. Dean. If you're watching this, I'm dead."

They should have expected no less from their melodramatic prophet.

Dean snorts.

Sam chortles.

It's really not even funny, and now is most certainly not the time to joke around. But, just for a millisecond, they've forgotten everyone's near-death, they've forgotten that their lives, so inherently anarchical, have descended into a mess that is unusual even for them. They've forgotten that it's not the same as it used to be, and that it never will be. For some reason, Kevin's directness just fractures the tension.

"He ain't sugarcoating it, is he?" Dean quips, nudging Sam (gently) with his elbow.

Sam grins lazily. "Nah," he concurs.

A hush uncoils over them as they let Kevin's words echo in the Impala.

"I figured out the third trial," the tiny speakers ring. The fuzz of static traverses his voice, making him sound as though he's speaking to them through a walkie-talkie, not some pre-recorded suicide note.

"It's a doozy," cyber-Kevin goes on, using dated vocab that they have come to expect from their AP scholar. "You have to cure a demon."

Sam and Dean's eyes meet in unfettered astonishment.

"_Now_," the teen goes on, as though he'd anticipated their perplexed reaction, "don't ask me how you do that. God wasn't feeling too explanatory on this one, so you're gonna have to figure it out for yourselves." He licks his lips, head bobbing towards the webcam and making his eyes look even more crazed than normal. "Good luck. Please don't screw this up."

Sam scratches the back of his shaggy head, shifting in the passenger's seat to stare at Dean. The latter's eyes are still fixed on the paused screen and his jaw is working.

"Whaddyou think that means?" questions the younger of the two.

Dean swallows. "I have no fucking idea."

Without warning, he slams the laptop shut and tosses it into the backseat with unmerited violence.

"It doesn't matter, anyway. We're done with the trials."

"But Dean –"

"I said we're _done_, Sam," he snaps, throwing the car into reverse.

The Impala jolts backwards, not giving Sam enough time to brace himself and causing his seatbelt to slice painfully into his collarbone.

Dean sends him apologetic sidelong glance, but doesn't speak. Out of the corner of his eye he can see his brother is hurting in more ways than one, but he can't afford to acknowledge the guilt accumulating like ice in his chest. His torn-up knuckles tighten around the steering wheel. _Pretend pretend pretend._

Sam says, carefully, "When we find it, we can still give him the Tablet and complete the trials."

"What part of 'no' aren't you getting?" Dean rebukes, John Winchester reaching beyond the grave through the strings of his son's vocal chords.

"But why not?!" Sam erupts. His passion is mislaid, lost amongst a successive fit of coughing.

"That's why! That's exactly why! We gotta get you better, not worry about the goddamn trials!"

When Sam finally catches his breath and scrubs the blood into the back of his hand, he wheezes, "What happened to our plan, Dean, what happened to everything we talked about?"

"It's over. We've got a new plan, now, and it's saving the poor saps we dragged into this shitshow. I'm not gonna let demons take anything else from me. I'm just not. And if that means throwing in the towel, so be it – but that's the end of it. I'm not discussing it any more, Sam. From now on, you got a problem, you keep it to yourself," he growls.

Sam changes his tactic. More resignedly, he says, "Something's happening to me, Dean, and it's nothing good. We both know it, and we both know where this track ends; this train is pulling into the station whether I complete the last trial or not. Please – why can't we just let some good come from this?"

Dean briefly scans the roof of the interior, distraught. "Dammit, Sam! Don't you dare talk like that, you hear me? Don't you fucking talk like that!"

"I'm just being realistic," he replies weakly, a morose smile playing at his lips.

Dean's entire body feels overheated, rage multiplying within him like a cancer. He can't take this. His veins are closing up, concentrating the blood in his head, in his temples, behind his eyes. "I swear to god, Sam, you keep talking like this and the trials are gonna be the least of your problems," he states, eerily calm. "You are not giving up on me." First Cas, now Sammy? No. He can't fucking take it.

"_You're _the one giving up, Dean! Like I said, like I always say: I see the light. But maybe it's not my light, maybe it's _yours_. You would do anything for me. You already have, you've done everything one person could possibly do for another and then some. It's my turn, now. And don't you tell me you wouldn't do the same exact thing if you were in my place."

This, he can't contest. But he still feels sick to his stomach.

"You're scared," Sam goes on, unnervingly zen. "So am I. But you know, once we get Claire and Kevin back, it's gonna be all right. It is. I know it's hard for you to imagine, but it's the truth. You're gonna get your happily-ever-after, Dean. You're gonna be a dad, a great dad; you're gonna be everything Dad wasn't for us, and I know that because that's what you were for me. And you and Claire are gonna get married and have a boatload more kids and grandkids and hell, maybe even a Golden Retriever, and you're gonna live in a world where you don't have to worry about demon-deals or Crowley or Lucifer or any of that shit. We just need to get over this hill first."

"Stop it."

"You'll see. I promise you, you'll see."

"Shut up, Sam, just shut up!"

His façade ruptures; his voice is ragged, harried, like he wishes he could rewind time and shove Sam's words back down his throat.

He slams his palm on the dashboard, abusing his car like he only does in times of extreme duress, like after their father sold his soul and died, messianically, so he could live. So he could live this piss-poor excuse for a life. For _nothing_.

He seems instantly remorseful, though, and runs his hand over the area as though he can rub away his sin.

His eyes are glued on the road out of necessity, because he can't bear to look at his passenger. He might punch him in the nose, which would most certainly not be good for his already-fragile state. He's just so fucking angry, so fucking lost.

He sees the horizon. It doesn't mean anything. It's just a line, a line dividing the real from the abstract and a line that never did him any good in his entire life. There is no real and not-real, no security to be found on solid ground. There's only pain and pain and more pain, and no explanation for it, no laws of physics to govern him, no straight line dividing what he can and can't survive; there's nothing to distinguish him from every other member of the human race apart from his bad luck.

The road stretches on, into the sky.

But it's just an optical illusion.

Sam doesn't match his brother's fury, either because he doesn't want to or because he's too tired to muster it. Instead, as instructed, he grits his teeth and looks out the window.

He's not sure if they're staring into the same sky.

. . .

Kevin and Claire, still captive, are starting to lose faith. It's been nearly a week already, and they both know that Sam and Dean's deadline (quite literally) is approaching rapidly.

Kevin's pre-programmed drive to translate the Tablet is beginning to kick in, causing something similar to what happened to Claire as the visions began to stop. While he was indeed in physical pain when he read, this is another experience entirely – Claire had been in so much pain that she was delirious.

But, luckily, Kevin hasn't descended to that state of agony just yet.

Or so they thought…

Suddenly, though, as he stands on his toes and tries to peer out through the blighted window for the millionth time, his knees give out. He falls to the ground, hard and without warning, and begins convulsing.

Claire rushes over to him and tries to cradle his head in her lap to keep him from hurting himself, but it is starkly apparent that he needs a doctor – she's way out of her depths.

"Help! Somebody!" she shouts, looking wildly around the stinking room. She doesn't know where to direct her plea, but she does know that it's likely futile. No one's listening. And if anyone is, they don't care.

"Kevin, Kevin," she chants, sweeping his hair off his clammy forehead even as his body continues to quake. "You're okay. You're gonna be okay."

He's not.

They aren't.

They never will be.

Just as suddenly, the door swings open and two suit-clad demons stride in to inspect the paroxysmal prophet.

"Do something," one of them, tall and brown-haired, barks at the other.

"Why?"

"Crowley says we're not supposed to let this one die," he hisses covertly, apparently too stupid to know Claire can still hear him.

The other glowers at the boy, dark, almond eyes scanning Kevin's flailing limbs disdainfully. "What's wrong with him?" is his dry inquiry.

"Is he dying?" is his partner's toneless addition.

Mechanically, Kevin shoots into a sitting position.

"Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spritius, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, et secta diabolica…"

The two demons hunch over, covering their ears in abhorrent shock.

Claire, thinking quickly, hauls Kevin to his feet and makes a break towards the door.

"… Ergo draco maledicte et legio secta diabolica," the young prophet continues to belt out, even as one of the two approaches him, eyes black and murderous.

It wraps its vessel's hand around his throat, but still he chokes, "U-ut Ecclésiam t-tuam se-cú-ra…"

Claire, currently, is facing off against the other demon, trying to dodge his grip. It must look fairly absurd, this dapperly dressed man chasing her battered and bloodied form around the dungeon while Kevin has been lifted clear off his feet and is reciting an exorcism.

She shoots him a quick glance of assessment, only to see, to her acute dismay, that his face is going blue from lack of oxygen.

"…t-te… rog…"

The demons' faces are contorted into hideous grimaces, but they're still stronger than they are.

"Te rogámus, audi nos!" Claire shouts, finishing the sacrament.

And just like that, a column of black smoke cascades horrifically out of each of their mouths, meeting in the air in a nebulous, inky plane.

Kevin and Claire duck underneath it and out the door.

* * *

**A/N: I hope you all enjoyed it! Please let me know what you think! We're nearing the end, so feedback is greatly appreciated. Also, I got the words from the exorcism online, so I hope they're in accordance with the show. And I figure Claire knows how to do an exorcism too, what with having Bobby cram all that information into her head in part 1 and all the free time she's had in the bunker.**


	23. Runnin' With The Devil

**A/N: Thank you so much to cheer11lindsay, sarahmichellegellarfan1, and ImpalaLove for reviewing the last chapter! I hope you all like this one.**

**Song: Runnin' With The Devil by Van Halen**

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**CHAPTER 23**

**Runnin' With The Devil**

The Winchesters both appreciate and abhor the irony in Kevin's choice of hiding place. It was Sam who'd spotted it – the billboard reading 'Devil Dave's Spicy Gumbo' in chipping, faded red paint. Slathered haphazardly on the decaying wood is a mural of Satan stirring a caldron, all but signaling 'X marks the spot.'

Sam says, "Whaddyou think the odds are that he hid it under that thing."

He was right in his half-joking suspicion and, after a few minutes of Dean digging, the Demon Tablet is unearthed.

And just in time, too, because several minutes later Crowley calls the elder of the two.

"Rocky. Bullwinkle," he begins airily, "I hope you boys have upheld your end of the bargain, because your allotted time is drawing to a close."

"We've got it, Crowley," Dean grunts into the cell phone. He leans back against the sleek hood of the car, his soiled hand gripping the base of the phone so forcefully he risks pulverizing it.

"Excellent. I'll text you the details," he replies, sounding as insufferably pleased as always.

They are conversing via text with the King of Hell, Dean acknowledges with a start. This is truly their life. It was always surreal, but this… this is something else.

And so, upon receiving Crowley's message, the brothers set out to an abandoned car factory on the outskirts of Kansas City.

Little do they know, the moment Crowley hangs up the phone, he turns to a fresh-out-of-Hell dozen of his henchmen and roars: "Whoever finds those bloody prophets first _won't _have their bowels strung up through their mouths, roasted, salted, and fed to them on a silver platter. Am I sufficiently clear?" He punctuates his declaration with an insincere smile, and the lesser demons shift uncomfortably knowing this very torture has already been inflicted on their two hapless cohorts. "Good," he says. "Now run along. You know how I loathe to be kept waiting."

. . .

How Claire and Kevin manage to make it out of the derelict building is a mystery, and how they manage to make it into the thick of a cornfield is an even bigger one. For all their training, Crowley's men have been taught to attempt to contain the Winchesters – angry forces of nature that level everything in their path, razing through the supernatural like Adonis-esque bulldozers.

The two prophets are most definitely not that.

Apparently and to their immense good fortune, the demons are not prepared to search for two small, sneaky humans hiding in old, rusty closets or behind disused machinery.

When they hit sunlight, their skin tingles, their eyes burn, and they heat up so quickly they feel almost feverish. There is no time to process this unpleasant sensation.

"Run," is all Claire tells her younger companion, and they do – they run like lunatics, like their lives depend on it, and they do. They run until their bones feel as though they're going to snap, until their muscles feel as though they're going to fray, until their lungs and hearts are working so hard they just might short-circuit and stop altogether.

Claire's feet hammer against the flimsy soles of her Keds, blisters building and bursting in a cycle of piercing discomfort. Eventually pavement morphs into to gravel, and gravel into soft, giving earth. When they finally stop in the cornfield, she dares to look down and sees blood decorating the lower portion of white canvas.

This is the least of her worries.

Kevin chokes out, "Where the hell are we?"

"Kansas?" Claire ventures, she too struggling to catch her breath. "He couldn't have taken us that far."

The air is crowded with plant matter, and smells of something indistinguishable. Part soil, part manure, part cornhusk. So very different from the dungeon they had been trapped in for seven unending days.

They pant and cough and pant and cough, not able to adjust quickly enough to this stark transition. Their bodies are weak with hunger, sapped of energy, and yet invigorated by adrenaline. The world is rotating again and the wind is blowing through their hair, too fast, throwing them off balance. The light should be a comfort, but it's not – it's too bright. It's overwhelming, it's terrifying, it's freeing.

She looks up, and the sky is the color of nothing she remembers. It hasn't seemed this blue in years.

She looks down at Kevin to see he is observing her curiously, and her face breaks into a grin. She can feel her lip split anew, can feel the varnish of blood on her freckled face crease into ugly, grotesque lines.

"We made it."

Kevin smiles back, plaque-encrusted teeth tinged red.

. . .

Sam and Dean arrive at the factory, that skeleton of the American Dream, and look upon a familiar sight. The parking lot is a wasteland of fractured tarmac and weeds, the building itself a rickety shell of steel and broken windows. Sometimes, Sam wonders if their adversaries' choices in rendezvous locations are conscious – subtle attempts at reminding them how far this world has already fallen. Crisscrossing the country the way they do, it's hard not to be all too aware of their nation's decaying glory. It reminds them that people and things still wither and die, completely independent of any supernatural interference.

(It reminds them that they can't save everyone).

It's hardest for Dean, he thinks, because his brother was never truly a member of his own generation.

(Never truly accepted that some things were out of his control).

And with all traces of their ancestors now eradicated, they're only left with shadows and ruins of the world they once inhabited.

(Shadows and ruins of themselves).

It probably wasn't Crowley's intention to remind them of this. He probably just needed a secluded place to stash Claire and Kevin. But still, it adds a nuanced, unexpected layer of torment to the whole ordeal; it twists the dagger.

Dean helps Sam out of their preserved relic of a car, winding his arm around his neck with a safely unreadable expression carved into his features. He uses one arm to support Sam, the other to cradle the Tablet, and the two brothers' forms, from a distance, merge into one limping mass – the Winchesters, wounded as always, but still and in spite of everything trudging on. They are the most accurate testament to their bloodline anyone could have ever imagined.

There is a certain hope, though, in the knowledge that they're not the last of their kind. Not this time.

And slowly, they shuffle towards the factory.

. . .

"W-we need to get to a town, get to a phone," Claire tells Kevin. "We need to get to Dean and Sam."

They've taken a short respite, only because they are physically incapable of pushing themselves any further. But as their strength begins to replenish itself at an agonizing pace, they need to formulate a plan to keep going.

It's rare, she thinks, that her body is actually too fatigued to go on. Usually there's some mental block, some psychological trauma that causes her to freeze up – like the time when Bobby died. True enough, she had been roughed-up plenty of times during her year of hunting with Dean. But never like this.

They sit in heaps of mulch and rotten corn, trying to figure out where they are and how they got there. Neither had paid much attention to the route they'd taken – they'd been far too preoccupied with the task of surviving to make a mental note of their surroundings. No, all the scenery had passed by in a blurry line of dull color and panic, which leaves them in a difficult predicament.

"There are tractor tracks leading that way," Kevin says, gesturing to his left. "We should follow them."

This is as good an idea as any, so Claire says, "Okay." Kevin's Hail-Mary escape maneuver has instilled a new faith in her, and she now fully trusts his judgment.

"Was – was that all an act? The seizure and everything?" she questions after a moment.

Kevin nods somewhat ruefully. "I wanted to warn you," he confesses, "but I didn't want to take the chance of them listening."

"I understand," she says. "That was really smart, Kev."

"Let's just say it's not my first rodeo when it comes to these assholes – I know from experience that demons are pretty goddamn stupid."

"Well, I wouldn't have thought of it, so I'm glad you did."

Kevin smiles gloomily. "I can see how it'd be hard to remember there's a method _other_ than brute force after spending all that time with those two."

Claire gives a short snicker of acknowledgment.

. . .

Quite frankly, Crowley is peeved.

How difficult could it possibly be to arrest two scrawny prophets? Really – it was deplorable a travesty that his useless, air-headed meat-sacks had let them escape in the first place. They didn't even have to interact with them, and yet they'd managed to dick it up.

Yes, Crowley is _quite_ peeved.

How is idiot minions will be dealt with is a matter to be considered at a later time, but it will certainly be _creatively_. For now, though, he has to maintain his charade of control – it's lucky he'd always considered himself something of a thespian.

Plus, the Winchester bros. aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the shed, as it were. It shouldn't be too difficult to fool them, he muses. _Remember,_ the more pragmatic part of his centuries-old brain insists, _do not underestimate those two_.

He rolls his eyes to himself at the fleeting notion, ushering it out of his mind.

He just has to stall – to stall until his men are able to retrieve his godforsaken bargaining chips and drag their insolent little asses back to their cell. Easy peasy.

Speak of the devil. As if on cue, he hears the shorter one's ever-guttural voice rasp out, "Get your ass over here, Crowley!" from the entrance of the building.

Crowley huffs, nostalgically recalling the days when a veritable summoning ritual was required to earn his attention. He straightens himself, adjusting the lapels of his jacket and rolling his neck from right to left.

He treads deliberately – one foot perfectly in front of the other – into the adjacent room, a Cheshire grin plastered across his face and his hands clasped behind his back.

"Hello, boys," he greets in his signature drawl.

Squirrel is snarling (nearly rabid, he thinks), standing with his feet wide and ready – perpetually ready – for a fight.

Moose is in another stance entirely. He looks perilously unstable, hardly able to support the weight of his own body. Crowley wagers a strong breeze might topple him over, send him bounding to the grimy floor and shatter his bones like a fallen China doll. And then there's the matter of his face – it's hollowed out to reveal razor-sharp cheekbones and sunken eyes, the sockets stained the color of raw flesh. Stubble shades the already-defined contours of his features, making him look even grimmer. To top it all off, his skin is coated in a sheen of cold sweat – if Crowley were worried about catching the plague, he would stay far, far away from this walking corpse of a man.

"You look bloody awful," the King of Hell snorts.

Sam sets his jaw, Adam's apple bobbing as he swallows heavily. Every bone, every muscle in his face is visible through his skin. It's stretched, taut, over his jutting brow and mandible and cheekbones, making it easy to imagine what his skull might look like.

Sam doesn't respond – maybe he can't. Dean says, "Where are they, you _son of a bitch_." He says the last part slowly, his tongue rolling over each syllable and enunciating it as precisely as he might an incantation.

Crowley's grin widens. "Now now. The Tablet, first." He nods his head pointedly towards the bundle under Dean's arm.

He shakes his head madly. "Uh uh. That is _not_ how this is gonna play out. You show me they're all right, and _then_ you get the Tablet," he growls.

The other's eyebrows shoot up in amusement. "It would seem, then, that we have reached an impasse."

"C'mon, Crowley," Sam pleads tiredly. "We did what you wanted. Just show us they're okay."

He gives the taller Winchester and inscrutable look, before his features relax and he says, "Fine. Alright. Those cloying puppy-dog eyes work on everyone, don't they?" The two seem vaguely hopeful, before Crowley goes on, "But first, we have a bit of paperwork to take care of."

He snaps his forefinger and thumb, and instantly a blond, well-dressed demon emerges from the darkened back room with a thick scroll of paper and pen.

"It's really very routine," the King of Hell chatters on. "A few initials here, a couple signatures there, and we'll be well on our way."

"We gotta read the fine print, Dean," Sam hisses to his older brother.

"The hell if I don't know that," he barks back.

Delicately, Crowley releases the bottom corners of the scroll, and it unravels across the floor, falling all the way to Sam and Dean's feet at _least _four yards away.

"Goddammit," Dean mutters to himself.

Suddenly, Crowley's cell phone begins to ring and 'Baby Got Back' echoes raucously through the empty factory.

"I'm sorry, this is rather rude, but I've got to take this – in the meantime, you two peruse the terms," he says, sounding ridiculously professional. "My intern, Brian, will be happy to answer any questions."

"Uh, it's Byron, sir…"

"Whatever."

Without another word, he walks off into the room 'Byron' came from, and the only bit of conversation they hear is "Hello?"

The Winchesters and Crowley's assistant eye each other warily, before Dean turns his attention to the papyrus. The lettering and language are equally flowery, though Dean doesn't know what else he would have suspected from that pretentious douchebag.

. . .

"We got them, sir. They didn't get very far – we found them wandering just down the road."

Crowley's earth-colored eyes scan the two prophets distastefully. "Don't let them out of your sight," he orders, "And don't bring them in until I say so."

He walks back into what was once the assembly room, and Dean is nearly finished reading the scroll.

"So far so good, I presume?"

His green eyes flick up, swirling with murderous hatred. "Where are they," he demands.

"Tell me we have an agreement, sign on the dotted line, and presto, you'll be reunited."

Dean lifts the pen, shifting it apprehensively between his fingers, and lowers it to the paper.

Crowley tuts, causing him to halt in his tracks. "No," he says, "the big galoot has to be the one to sign it."

Dean glances over his shoulder at the man in question, who looks altogether very upset. "Sam?"

Begrudgingly, Sam steps forward and extracts the pen from his brother's hands.

He scribbles his name down, and Crowley, smiling broadly, calls, "Bring 'em in!"

Dean's heart flops when he sees the state Claire is in, but his dismay gives way to fury in a millisecond.

"What did you do to them?!"

"Oh, _relax_. They're all just minor flesh wounds, which were thoroughly earned, let me assure you."

Sam is closest to Claire, and it is his arms that she collapses into. It's miraculous that he is actually able to withstand the added weight, and they both waver exaggeratedly as they cling to one another. His nostrils are immediately filled with the scent of blood and dirt. It's not a foreign combination.

"You need to get close," she whispers in his ear, slipping something into his back pocket. In all the commotion, nobody notices.

They break apart when Dean's voice jars them.

"Claire?" he grinds out.

She hobbles over the other Winchester, and he is able to sustain his posture much more easily when she wraps her arms around his neck. He hands the Tablet to Sam so he can fully latch onto her, so he can fully trust that he has her back.

He can feel blood matted all over her and he has never wanted to kill Crowley more than he does at this moment.

"What did they do to you," he murmurs desperately into her filthy hair. It was once so beautiful, but now it's stiff and tainted the color of rust. "What did they do?"

"I'm okay," she says, and he tightens his grip on her, unconvinced.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," he goes on, voice breaking, "This is all my fault."

"It's not," she refutes earnestly. "It's really not." She wants to kiss him but she feels disgusting, so she doesn't. She just buries her face into the fabric of his jacket, shaking with relief.

"_Ahem_," Crowley clears his throat. He inclines his head to peer up at Sam, making grabbing motions with his hand. "Gimme gimme," he says.

Seething, Sam holds the Tablet out, and Crowley hooks onto it, trying to pry it from his grasp.

But Sam isn't going to relinquish it quite so easily.

All at once, Crowley rips the Tablet from his hand and Sam clamps a pair of handcuffs – the ones Claire had slipped into his pocket – around his wrist.

And Crowley chuckles. He says, "Is this a joke?" His eyes dart from Sam, to Dean, to Claire, and finally to Kevin. "You realize, all I have to do is…" He snaps his fingers, but nothing happens.

"Demonic handcuffs," Kevin sneers victoriously. "No teleporting, no smoking out, which pretty much means that you're our bitch now, Crowley."

"You've got a mouth on you," the King of Hell observes in abstract amusement. He sighs and says, "And as much as I like this kinky little game, alas, it's going to have to end. Boys!" he shouts, and half a dozen demons come running out.

Dean, through his shock, almost smiles. Because this is the easy part.

He releases Claire, quickly finding the Angel Blade in his front pocket, and handily defeats all of the demons as they run at Sam, who is all the while tugging Crowley along with one hand and clutching the Demon Tablet to his chest with the other.

Dean fights like a man possessed, his immense rage unleashed at full force now that he finally has a target.

The feeling is scarily near ecstatic – the feeling of his blade sliding between their ribs, the squelching sound of tissues and organs rupturing beneath his hand. All of his anger towards Crowley can effectively be funneled towards his minions, and Dean is not going to hesitate in doing so. And maybe he looks like an animal, a monster, as he slashes through these bodies, but he doesn't care – and the others don't seem to care, either. Everyone is numbed to violence, anyway.

They're all dead pretty swiftly. Byron's limp form leaks blood under his boots.

And then it's just Dean, Sam, Claire, Kevin, and Crowley, lumbering on towards the Impala, making tracks in the blood.

"Y-you can't do this," Crowley insists wildly. "We signed a contract – you're bound!"

"You might wanna recheck that," Sam says, smirking knowingly.

Crowley does and, to his immense displeasure, sees that Sam has signed his name 'Moose.'

"Son of a whore…" he mutters in abandoned frustration. He cannot believe these buffoons have out-foxed the fox.

Dean, meanwhile, is focused primarily on Claire's well being. His gaze flits from her head to her feet, and his eyes widen in horror when he sees the state of her shoes – without a word he hoists her up, carrying her bridal-style out of the factory. She's too exhausted to protest.

"Where did you get those?" he asks Kevin.

"We snuck back because we figured you'd be here and broke into the Impala – sorry, by the way," he replies sheepishly.

"We let ourselves get captured again –"

"You escaped?" Dean cuts her off incredulously.

"Yeah, we escaped, but we couldn't find a way to reach you guys so we came back, and I knew the handcuffs were in there –"

"And I told her about the third trial," Kevin pipes in. "Did you get my message?"

"About the third trial? Yeah, we did," Sam answers.

"You're gonna love it, Crowley," Dean says, grinning genuinely. Things have, for once, taken an unexpected turn in a decidedly positive direction. "We're gonna cure you."

"_Cure_ me? Are you daft?"

"It's gonna be a whole barrel of laughs, jackass. You have no idea how long I've been waiting to get my hands on you – and when you're mortal? Well, that's when the real fun will begin."

"I'm flattered by the sentiment, but you're not really my type…"

Dean rolls his eyes. He would punch him in the face if he had a free hand, but there will be plenty of time for that later.

"And if that's the plan, you'd do well to hurry it up – Big Bird here doesn't look like he's gonna last much longer."

True enough, Sam's gait is worrying. It's becoming harder and harder for him to walk on his own, let alone haul Crowley along – it takes both his and Kevin's full attention.

Dean wishes he could sling his arm around his neck and help him, just like he always has.

But he can't carry them all.

When they pull out of the parking lot, the only trace they leave behind – apart from the heap of bodies inside – is Mary's plastic carseat. It lays face-down on the pavement, shrinking from view through the rear window and abandoned to make room for the devil.

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**A/N: I hope you all liked it! Please let me know! I tried to play with the whole Winchesters-save-the-day framework.**


	24. Damaged Soul

**A/N: Thank you so so so much to ImpalaLove for your kind review! I'm so glad you're still enjoying the story, and I hope everyone else is too!**

**Song: Damaged Soul by Black Sabbath**

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**CHAPTER 24**

**Damaged Soul**

Upon arriving back at the bunker, the first thing Claire does – even before throwing herself into one of the marble showers with exceptional water-pressure, as she so desperately wants to – is find her daughter. It's been a week, and they've never been apart so long.

Jody is horrified by her mangled appearance, but she hardly acknowledges her concerns. All she can think of is her child.

When she scoops her up and _finally_ cradles her in her arms, things do not go as she anticipated.

The little girl starts crying at once, huge, pearl-like tears welling in eyes that are identical to her mother's; she's most likely afraid of what's happened to Claire because, in all fairness, she's unrecognizable. So Dean steps in, because _now_ she is used to him and _now_ she knows he's her father and _now _he is confident enough in his own parenting abilities to calm her.

And when she stops wailing and Sam asks to hold her, he lets him, because by then Claire has rushed out of the nursery and he knows he should follow her.

She cries the whole way through her scalding shower; she's not quite sure why. She's back, now, she's safe, now. She should be happy.

Dean can hear her from beyond the bathroom door – the pounding jet of water might've hidden her sobbing, if he hadn't been listening for it. He rakes his fingertips over the polished barricade between them, wishing he could do something to quell her pain, and rests his forehead futilely against the doorway. He knows there's not much he can do after-the-fact, just as he knows he should have been able to prevent this.

Claire never broke that week she was in captivity. She stayed calm and alert and never let her guard down, just like she had learned to do under pressure, just like Dean and Sam and Bobby had always taught her. But every blow, every worry she internalized, accumulated inside of her. And now they're all bubbling up, rushing to the surface as she gets rid of the evidence. Her own daughter being afraid of her is the last straw.

She sits in the corner, the wet tiles searing her bare skin, and curls up, hugging her knees against her chest and trying to let the molten downpour wash her down the drain. She can pretend she's still strong as streams run down her face, because only half of the water is coming from the inside.

Still, though, she licks her lips and tastes salt.

When she emerges in a haze of steam, she is glowing red, especially around her eyes. The color contrast makes her irises seem unnaturally blue, like they're glowing too.

And Dean is right there, a foreign look on his face. It's some amalgamation of pity and remorse and despair, some abstract emotion she doesn't have a name for.

She sniffles and needlessly rubs at her face, and Dean's eyebrows bend to convey something more concrete – compassion.

"C'mere," he murmurs, pulling her against him. He kisses her damp hairline and says, "You're okay now. I've got you. I'll never let that happen again."

She pulls away to look him squarely in the eye. "It was _my_ fault, Dean. It was all my fault. I did that to myself."

"You were trying to help Kevin," he defends feebly.

"How many times has trying to help someone gotten you into much deeper trouble than you were trying to prevent?"

His jaw tightens as he grinds his back teeth. Too many times. Nearly _every_ time.

"Exactly," she says, reading his mind. "I should have known better."

"_I _should have been able to save you," he insists, voice gravelly. There's such conviction in his tone, but Claire can't help but think it's misplaced.

"You would have. We just saved ourselves first."

His gaze skims briefly over the ceiling, searching it aimlessly, before re-tethering itself to her. "What matters now is that you and Kevin are back home in one piece." Home. _Home_. The word floods out before Dean even has a chance to process it.

Is that what this is? Is this what it feels like? He's never had a home before. Not apart from the Impala, not apart from Sam. He doesn't truly remember the one that burned down when he was four.

This notion distracts him for moment, so when Claire's lips meet his he's caught off guard.

It's soft – tender, almost. More of an expression of relief than anything else.

This is all so new for him, by virtue of _not_ being new. Dean had always been prone to boredom and, in the back of his mind, he feared he would be in this regard, too. When he was younger, girls never really captured his interest for more than a few days – whether it was because he didn't let them or simply because they were never very interest_ing_, he never determined. But the fact remained that his attentions were easily diverted.

When he and Claire started out, things had gone mostly the way they always went – a lot of passion, an indescribable spark, yada yada yada. Every time she touched him, his stomach would scorch a hole through his middle and fill him with a basic sort of hunger; emotion came later. Emotion was a reaction to physical contact.

Now, it's the opposite. Now, physical contact is a reaction to emotion.

He glides his thumb over her smooth-yet-bruised jaw line, before brushing a slick lock of hair behind her ear. They are so close she can see every pore in his handsome face, and he can see each of the myriad shades of purple defiling her complexion.

"I just want this to be over, Dean," she says woefully, her voice barely a whisper.

"It will be. Soon," he states.

She kisses him again, and this time he maneuvers them so they're in their room, not in the middle of the hallway where Jody or Kevin or Sam could walk by at any minute and see her in her towel making out with him.

The bunker, despite being filled with people, is quiet. Mary is asleep, at Sam's doing, and Kevin is probably trying to scrub away a week's worth of scum, too. Sam was sitting in the chair beside Mary's crib last he saw him. Since returning he's been glued to her for reasons Dean doesn't want to contemplate.

So he doesn't. He focuses on Claire, this wonderful thing in his life that _isn't going to disappear_.

They somehow fall onto the mattress, arms and legs all tangled and intertwined, and Claire murmurs, "I love you," because she's realized that even though it's understood between them, they never say it, and when she was in that dungeon wondering if she would ever see him again this was what she wished she could tell him.

"Claire…" His breath is hot and sweet against the shell of her ear.

"I want you to know that," she tells him, propping herself up on her elbow to stare at him intently.

He scans her face, trying to discern her motives. "I do," he replies slowly, "I do know that." He can't tell if she's telling him just for the sake of it or if she's looking to hear the words returned, so he decides to err on the safe side and adds, "And of course I love you too, Claire."

"Yeah," she says with a weak smile. She presses her lips to his again, and when they drift apart repeats, "Yeah, I know."

His eyebrows pull together in a fleeting display of perplexity, but the look vanishes in a flash, only to be replaced by a tepid smile that mirrors hers.

With Dean she feels safe, even though the moment he entered her life a grim, smothering shadow followed him in. He is so resilient and stable and _solid _that it's hard to believe anything bad could happen with him nearby. And yet trouble is so inextricable from him that maybe now it's actually _part_ of him.

Dean knows this about himself, of course, and he hates it. When he studies her body, he's guilt-ridden – there are so many scrapes and bruises and gashes marring her creamy skin, and each one is a reminder of his infinite failings.

Claire doesn't like to see him peer down at her this way – his eyes have always grazed over her body with a distinctly different darkness in them.

He hardly touches her for fear of aggravating her injuries, so she winds her fingers around his wrists and pushes his palms into her scraped ribcage, into her bruised hipbone, as though to assure him she hasn't broken yet, and that he won't break her.

Still, he is agonizingly gentle.

"I need you," she implores breathily, and she does. She needs him in every way one person could need another, and so much so it almost disgusts her. She needs him here and not to treat her differently, she needs him to make her remember what it's all for, remember that it's all worth it, that it _will be_ worth it.

In the end, these – _not _'I love you' – turn out to be the magic words.

. . .

For the billionth time, Dean doesn't know how to feel – just like always, he's running the gamut of human emotion. Funnily enough, in retrieving Claire and Kevin, he's lost track of everything else.

He's lost track of his implicit position of leadership, lost track of their plan, lost track of how to save his brother.

Before, there was a certain relief in knowing they were going to get rid of the Tablet, in knowing that the trials were going to end, unfinished. And yes, he wanted to close the Gates of Hell – of course he did. More than anything, he did, he wanted to make the world safe.

But he's learned perfectly well that everything comes at a price.

And the not-knowing what that price was – that uncertainty – haunted him, and to forfeit it was something of a comfort. This world is a battlefield, but at least he knows the terrain.

But now they're… back on track.

And Sam's not going to get any better.

He's getting _worse_.

And, Dean thinks, all the forces around him are pushing him forward, herding him down this one road, this one road he's not sure he wants to go down. And this is wrong too, wrong because they shouldn't have to push him – he should be moving on his own. _He should be moving forward_, but his feet are stuck. Stuck in all the coagulated blood.

Crowley is in the dungeon. Jody is back in South Dakota. Kevin and Claire and Mary are safe.

This should be enough.

But Sam is dying.

He understands, now. He understands what it was like for Sam after that Rawhead-hunt-gone-wrong, when his heart stuttered to a slow stop, when they hadn't yet learned that death wasn't as inescapable as they always believed. (He thinks, all the time, what if he'd just died right then, and never come back? It was, by definition's reasoning, the end of his natural life). He understands the desperation, the need to find a way out, the feeling of clawing fruitlessly at the walls of feasibility as they close in on you. He understands. Dying slowly is one thing. Watching someone you love die slowly is another.

Sam, hunched over a desk, coughs out, "How the hell are we gonna cure Crowley?"

"I have an idea," Claire says unexpectedly. She feels a bit uncomfortable as all eyes shift to her, but nevertheless goes on, "I've been cooped up here for months. There's not much to do but read, and I've come across some interesting files…"

"What kind of interesting?" Dean questions, quirking an eyebrow. His chiseled features form a painstaking mask of indifference, and no one would have any inkling that he was drowning inside just by looking at him. _Pretend pretend pretend._

"I don't remember all the details because I came across it a while ago. From what I_ do_ remember, back in, like, the '50s, some priest tried an 'experimental exorcism.'"

"What do you mean _'experimental'_?" Sam asks skeptically.

"I don't know. Something about injecting the possessed person with blood – it was really freaky, even by our standards. There was a film reel in the folder too, but I never watched it – we would need one of those old-school cameras."

Sam, Dean, and Kevin all independently lock eyes, before Kevin proposes, "Movie night?"

Dean, with the phantom of a smirk distorting his lips, says dryly, "I guess someone better make popcorn."

. . .

What they now know from the late Father Max Thompson is this: trap a demon on consecrated ground, inject it once every eight hours with 'purified' human blood, recite an incantation, and a demon will turn mortal, effectively occupying its current vessel's body as a full-blown human.

The Winchesters have seen some crazy shit in their lifetimes. But this is a whole other ballgame.

"So essentially, a demon's soul is a human one that is twisted beyond recognition – but what this exorcism is meant to do is comb out the knots, so to speak, and make it revert back to what it once was," Sam debriefs everyone.

"And we're gonna do this with Crowley? Of all the two-bit Crossroads Demons we could've chosen, we're gonna do this with King-of-Hell-_Crowley_?" demands Dean, obviously dissatisfied.

"Think of it as killing two birds with one stone," Kevin interjects.

"Yeah, except it's a bird we wouldn't need to kill in the first place if this trial shit works," Dean maintains.

"It could be worse," Sam says optimistically. "Crowley may be King of Hell, but remember that he's still just some shmucky tailor from 17th Century Scotland. Could be worse – could be a 200,000-year-old Lilith, or something. We've staked _vamps_ that're older than Crowley – he really shouldn't be that out of touch with his humanity. Plus," he seems to remember, "don't you want your revenge?"

This strikes a chord with Dean; yes. Yes, he does. So, through clenched teeth, he concedes, "Fine. Let's just get this over with."

Ultimately, they agree to do the trial tomorrow. It will be a Sunday. It just seems right. Certainly God has forsaken them, but there's no denying he exists, and they need all the help they can get.

Dinner that night feels horrifically like a last supper. Dean has made tomato-and-rice soup so Sam can 'get his strength up for the big day tomorrow.' As though he's prepping for a decisive Little League game. As though _soup_ could possibly have any mitigating impact on his physical deterioration.

Still, Sam shoots him an anemic smile before he spoons the concoction into his mouth, knowing that maintaining this sham means more to Dean than shattering it means to him. A blanket is draped across his shoulders as feverish chills rack his body, and his figure is so broad and gaunt that all the fabric seems to overpower him and hang off his bones as if he were a mannequin.

Dean's efforts aren't completely in vain – Mary, for one, _loves_ the soup.

Sam watches her fondly; she now has food all over her cheeks and hands. Claire attempts – to no real avail – to mop up some of the mess, but Mary is a cyclone of destruction.

"Must be genetic," Sam observes.

"Must be," Claire snorts in accord, and Dean doesn't even bother to look offended – the thought of Mary turning out to be a little clone of him fills his heart with insurmountable pride… Just so long as she never experiences any of the same catastrophes that corrupted him.

Kevin, all the while, stirs the liquid around in his bowl, a melancholy look darkening his face as he stares down at the miniature red whirlpool and recalls his own family – his mother. She used to make her own variation of this soup when he wasn't feeling well.

_You'll see her soon enough_, he assures himself.

They're at the finish line. All they have to do is cross it.

* * *

**A/N: Only one more chapter to go! Please please please let me know what you think!**


	25. The Song Remains the Same

**A/N: Thank you so so much to ImpalaLove, toridw317, sarahmichellegellarfan1, and Lindsay for reviewing the last chapter! I can't believe we made it to 100 :O This is the LAST CHAPTER, so it was quite the task to write (and, in true form, I couldn't stop myself from making it excessively long). I hope you all enjoy it, and thank you so much for sticking with me this far!**

**Song: The Song Remains the Same by Led Zeppelin**

* * *

**CHAPTER 25**

**The Song Remains the Same**

Before Dean can comfortably fade off into the bleak unconsciousness of his nightmares, he decides to sneak down the hall to check on his brother. If he can put at least one fear to rest before he puts himself to rest, he can consider that a small victory.

Everyone else is already in bed, and he's careful not to wake Claire as he slips out from beneath the sheets. She shifts slightly at the loss of body-heat and her eyelids flutter, but don't open.

Sam's room, unlike Dean's, is barren. There are no decorations on the walls, no photos or magazines or records; just a pistol that he barely has the strength to raise concealed underneath his pillow.

The door is ajar – almost all the way closed, but not quite. Dean pushes it wider with the very tips of his fingers, subconsciously dreading what is about to be revealed. He can't remember a time when Sam didn't sleep with the door firmly shut, and so part of him suspects something is amiss.

Knowing when Sam's in danger… It's like a sixth sense, a little alarm bell that jangles in the back of his mind. It's had to be. How else would he know which direction to point his life in?

That bell had been keeping him awake, and right now the volume is ratcheting up.

And then he sees.

"Sam Sam _Sam,_" is the prayer that flies from his mouth as he flies towards his bedside.

His little brother is convulsing on the rickety mattress that came with the room, the sixty-year-old springs whining with each jerk of his body. Long strands of hair are pasted to his forehead, obscuring his eyes, which he imagines are screwed shut anyway.

The second Dean reaches Sam he realizes that he is smoldering from the inside out; his skin is not warm, but _hot_ to the touch. Sam has had a low-grade fever for nearly three months, but Dean is no doctor and even he can recognize that his brother's body temperature is well above anything that is anatomically sound. He shouldn't even be able to _get _this hot, let alone remain alive through it.

Again, Dean is no doctor. He doesn't know what to do in a situation like this. He's played many roles in his lifetime, but he's not equipped to play this one.

All he can think to do is extinguish the fire.

He drags Sam's long-limbed frame down the hall, to the bathroom. He rolls him into the tub and draws the cold water. As the water level climbs, he sprints to the kitchen to get ice.

His heart is working a mile-a-minute. His breathing is erratic. He's gonna need to take an ice bath too after this, he wagers. It crosses his mind that he's having a panic attack but he's not sure, and it's not like it even matters anyway.

Not like this. His brain is screaming _not like this._

It's not supposed to go this way. He only had to make it through the night.

Dean dumps the plastic bag full of ice into the water with a _crack_. Sam's body occupies the whole tub and then some, and his soaked clothes make it look dark – abyssal.

The water toys with his hair and clothing, lifting it. He seems suspended in time, serene, even.

Dean shoves his head beneath the frigid water.

And waits.

And waits.

And he counts each second, because he knows exactly how long the human brain can survive without oxygen. He counts and he counts, and as his countdown reaches the point of no return, his breath hitches and his throat and eyes burn, because he's not going to drown his brother but he's not snapping out of this fever-induced coma and _not like this._

And just as his own heart is about to stop…

Sam plunges from the black with a roaring gasp.

Dean could cry tears of joy – he almost does. But by now the ruckus has woken up the rest of the bunker, and Kevin and Claire are huddled in the doorway, silent. What they're witnessing – these two brothers coming undone right at the end – is a tale as old as time, and not one they're truly meant to be a part of.

And so they don't say anything. The just watch like the horrified spectators they are, like anyone else who has ever had the misfortune of seeing the Winchester Cycle up-close.

Dean helps his soaking and shivering brother out of the tub, muddled relief and vexation folding a deep crease in his brow. Sam's lips are pulled thin and the color of a bruise, and the beads of water on his face catch the light, making him look almost radiant... Or, more accurately, radioactive.

The sound of water splattering on linoleum rouses Claire from her trance, and she quickly offers Sam a clean towel. His hands shake as he reaches for it, but she bridges the gap between them and wraps it around him herself.

"C'mon," she murmurs, impossibly calm, "let's get you into some dry clothes."

Dean watches in something akin to awe as she leads him back to his bedroom, but soon locks eyes with Kevin. His pupils are wide, black pools rippling with fear.

Dean rushes out of the bathroom.

He and Claire cross paths in the threshold of Sam's doorway. "You should help him," she says, as though he even needs to be told.

Dean just nods.

. . .

The eldest Winchester awakes with a crick in his neck.

His eyes open slowly and focus to see Sam asleep on the bed across from his chair, stiff as a board, like rigor mortis has set in.

But he knows he's alive – he stayed with him all night to make sure of it.

It must be morning. He can't tell in this windowless cell of a room, but it must be because there are sounds coming from the kitchen. Sounds of pots clashing. Sounds of normalcy. Sounds of them still orbiting the sun.

Without these, he might have been able to trick himself into thinking it was still nighttime, into thinking they didn't have to do this. Night has always been a time of danger and uncertainty, a time when all the evil things creep out unabashedly into the world; never has he wanted it to stretch on, until this moment.

But it isn't nighttime, and they do have to do this.

"C'mon, Sammy," he says, nudging his brother.

Sam stirs, before his swollen eyes crack open. The first thing he sees is Dean.

"Rise n' shine," he greets with an obviously forced smirk.

With a groan, the younger of the two hoists himself into a sitting position and swings his legs over the side of the bed. He stands, and Dean readies himself to catch him if need be.

" 'm okay," he insists unconvincingly.

In the end, his assistance is not needed, and Sam treads into the kitchen on his own.

Dean follows helplessly.

Everyone is in the kitchen, and the first thing they say is not 'How are you feeling,' or 'Good to see you back on your feet,' or anything of the sort. Claire is the one to break the silence, and she states bluntly, "I'm going with you."

Both brothers are caught off guard. "What?" Dean questions.

"When you go to finish the trials," she clarifies, "I'm going with you. You've done all of them on your own so far, but not this one."

"But Mary –"

"I said I'd stay with her," Kevin chimes in solemnly.

Eyes glittering, she repeats, "I'm going," and neither of the Winchesters dares to challenge her. The memory of when they first set out on the road together all those years ago skitters across Dean's mind.

Something else strikes him, too: she cares about Sam deeply, more than just the superficial fondness for someone who is, essentially, her brother-in-law. She cares about him apart from Dean.

He'd been blind to it before, blinded by his own love for Sam. He didn't even notice, it didn't even register that they spent a year together without him, that Sam held her hand through one of the darkest times in her life – in _their_ lives – and now she wants to do the same. And he hadn't been letting her.

Sam means everything to him, but he means something to Claire, too.

Dean says, "Okay," and Sam looks almost thankful. No more is said, because there's little else to say, and the two brothers sit at the counter. They eat mechanically, like their bodies are nothing more than machines that need refueling. Sam's is a broken one; he eats slowly so as to not aggravate the queasiness in his stomach. A few nibbles of toast, and that's all he can take.

When they're done, Kevin, in all seriousness, says, "Good luck, guys."

"Thanks," mutters Sam.

Dean kisses the crown of his daughter's head on his way down to the dungeon.

The 'consecrated ground' component of the equation is an abandoned church located less than five miles away from the bunker.

They load Crowley into the back of the Impala, and Claire sits beside him. He has a look of amusement glinting across his puggish features the entire time, like he's in on some furtive joke, like he's laughing at their expense.

They ignore him. Sam thinks they'll be the ones laughing soon enough. Soon as he has the lung capacity to allow it.

The four of them have been to many churches, but none like this. Derelict ones aren't as common as you might expect – there's something sacrilegious about letting a house of God fall to waste, after all, and the US is a very Christian country around these parts.

The sheet of white is flaking, exposing the pine boards that are nailed together and creeping towards the sky. The material looks just the same as a coffin's, even in the sunlight, and the steeple reaches upwards like some abomination sprouting from the lifeless ground; the grass out front is overgrown and straw-colored.

Dean throws himself out of the driver's seat and goes to drag Crowley brutally out of the backseat, his sullied fingernails cutting into the back of his neck.

"Let's go, dipshit," he grunts.

Crowley snorts, "You lot _really_ think you can pull this off, don't you? Well, Godspeed – truly, I mean it."

Dean's features are hard, unyielding. Maybe they can't cure Crowley – but they can sure as hell kill 'im, and if it comes to that he'll rejoice.

"Someone shut him up," Sam grumbles, and Dean is happy to oblige by slapping a thick piece of duct tape over the King of Hell's mouth.

A thicket of brambles obscures the entrance to the church, and Dean tears through them without a second thought, even as they sink into his skin.

The inside is littered with dust, debris, and pages from deserted hymnals. The more lavish parts have been looted, leaving cross-shaped stencils in the filth. It's not very large – about the size of Claire's old apartment.

Claire and Sam linger in the vestibule as Dean unceremoniously drags the cathedra down from the sanctuary, into the center of the room. Wood grates against wood like nails on a chalkboard.

Sam, with the little vitality he has left, then shoves Crowley into the termite-ravaged throne and binds his arms to the sides, making sure the shackles chafe his soon-to-be-mortal flesh.

In the Winchesters' familiar army-green duffle are a syringe, a bible, some holy water, and their other customary demon-killing supplies.

"This is gonna take a while, guys," says Sam, readying the syringe. "You sure you wanna stick around for all of it?"

"We ain't goin' anywhere," Dean states matter-of-factly.

Sam nods, before making a fist and trying to pop a vein in the underside of his forearm. However, he seems to abruptly remember something, and sets the needle down on the altar.

"What's the matter?" Claire asks, brows crossed in confusion.

"I forgot – I gotta _purify _first," is all he says in reply, before heading off to the confessional.

Claire and Dean lock eyes, sharing one indeterminate expression.

"Don't you need a priest for that?" she hisses.

He shrugs. At this point, what's a priest gonna do for them that they can't do for themselves? Say a prayer? Dean could almost laugh. Fuck that. Fuck prayers. Prayers didn't stop the Apocalypse. They did. He and Sam.

Inside the rundown confessional, Sam isn't quite sure where to start. His sins are innumerable; he's been wallowing in them for as long as he can remember, and to try to sort through them is a Sisyphean task. But he does, he does try. Brick by brick, he disassembles the dam he's built to preserve himself from a complete inundation of guilt.

His sins flood back to him chronologically: leaving Dean to go to Stanford, walking out that door, dying and causing Dean to trade his soul for his, failing Dean, letting Dean die, letting Dean be dragged down to Hell right in front of him, not finding a way to unpin himself from that wall, Ruby, drinking demon blood, going off the deep end, walking out that door _twice, _Lilith, Lucifer, _all of it. _God, he thinks, feeling weak in a more metaphysical sense, oh god oh god oh god. He has so many sins.

"I'm sorry," he coughs, looking up, searching for absolution. All he sees is the ceiling, all he sees are slivers of light filtering through the cracks in the gangrenous wood. He can't say what he's sorry for. There's too much, and he can't seem to vocalize it, so he just goes on, "I-I'm so sorry… For everything."

And then he waits, like he's waiting for an answer, like he's waiting for something to happen.

But every other time he's been in a situation like this, he's waited for nothing. And so, he leaves the confessional.

As soon as he steps outside, to his tremendous shock, an epiphany fills him like a glass of cold water. He suddenly understands the pain, the fever, the blood. If he had been anyone else, it wouldn't have hurt so much. It had to be him, the whole time _it_ _had to be him. _That blood… that's the demon blood, that's Azazel's blood leaving his body.

The trials have been purifying him all along.

And now he's ready, truly ready.

Dean and Claire's eyes track his movements across the church, to the altar. He takes the syringe in hand and slides the needle into his skin, watching expressionlessly as his thick, dark blood is sucked out of his veins and into the glass.

He plunges the un-sanitized needle into Crowley's jugular, and the demon's muffled curses resound unintelligibly through the cavernous room.

Casually, Sam peeks at his watch. One down, seven to go.

No one says anything, because Dean and Claire have come to the unspoken agreement that Sam should be the one to initiate any conversation.

And sure enough Sam, eyes fixed on the rubble at his feet, muses, "Dean… Do you remember when we were kids, when you used to read me those bedtime stories about… about the Knights of the Round Table, and King Arthur and Sir Galahad and the Holy Grail?"

Dean shifts his jaw in a combination of befuddlement and something more obscure. He tries not to dwell on thoughts of simpler times anymore, but he does indeed remember, remember that that chubby-cheeked kid rifling through bags of Cracker Jacks for prizes has turned into _this. _"Yeah?" he says, as though he doesn't see his point. And really he doesn't, he doesn't see the point to any of it.

Claire watches him carefully, trying to understand what's happening. Right now, Dean looks almost as ill as Sam does.

"I remember thinking," he goes on brokenly, finally snapping his eyes up to meet his brother's, "I could never go on a quest like that, because… I'm not clean. I mean, I was just a little kid, but do you think maybe I knew, even then? That I… that I had _demon _blood in me? And about… about the evil of it?"

Dean's eyes scintillate with a deep, futile unhappiness. "Sam…" he warns, voice quivering even over that one simple syllable.

"It doesn't matter anymore," he cuts him off, smiling wide and chillingly. "Because now… _Now_, I'm going to be. These trials, they're purifying me, and when this is over, that… that _part_ of me will finally be gone."

He's just not sure how many other parts will go along with it.

. . .

Five injections later, the sun is setting and Claire and Dean are taking a break in the churchyard. Darkness is seeping down into the horizon, tainting the sky. People think sunsets are beautiful, but this one is stomach-churning.

Dean leans against the Impala, looking world-weary as he digs the heel of his boot into the dead grass.

Claire asks, "Do you think it's working?"

"I dunno," he dismisses flatly, and her features pinch in a hurt expression.

He kicks up a clump of dirt and digs his hands out of his pockets before he acknowledges her stare. "I really don't know, Claire," he amends.

As far as he can see, all this is doing is immolating his brother. Right now Sam's in there, sweat running down his chest and back and fusing his shirt to his skin. Right now Sam's in there with track-marks in his veins, like a drug addict. Right now Sam's in there, trying so hard to make himself into the sacrificial lamb he was never meant to be.

It makes him want to cry out, the religiousness of it all. He has to believe in it, he has to, but he so desperately doesn't want to. Why did it have to be a church? Huh? Why? Who's supposed to follow that sacrificial example? Humanity? Because it seems to be an affliction particular to the Winchesters, and no one else. What makes them so different? Why did 'He' put this curse on them? _Why? _What did they do to deserve it?

Dean knows he'll never find the answers to these questions, just as he knows exactly what's going to happen to him when he dies. He's going to go upstairs or downstairs, and in either place he's going to be surrounded by dickheads.

And there will be no answers.

"Dean," comes Claire's gentle voice. She's peering at him with a confused sort of anguish, and there are still bruises on her face.

He did this to her. Her brought her into this. She may not be a Winchester, but neither was his mother, and that story ended just the same as all the others.

Plus, his daughter certainly is. Mary Winchester. The name was supposed to be an honor, and he can only pray to a god he hates that it's not a prophecy.

He should be the one to get them out of this – not his brother, not Sammy.

Perhaps it's the knowing-what-happens-after that's numbed them both to death. Dean's not afraid to die, not anymore, and apparently Sam isn't either. Dean's far more afraid of living in a world without his brother – he's petrified of it.

And maybe Sam is, too, and maybe _that's _why they fought over who would complete the trials.

"It's okay," Claire tells him uselessly, playing with the sleeve of his jacket. "Whatever happens, it'll be okay."

Right then, she has no idea how much she sounds like a Winchester.

Dean gives her a conciliatory half-smile. "I know, babe," he lies, wrapping his arm around her shoulders.

They stay like this for several minutes, against the car, before Claire suggests, "It's getting close to the seventh injection. Maybe we should go back in?"

He nods his assent, keeping his arm slung around her as they trek into the building.

Inside, Sam has removed the duct tape from Crowley's mouth, and the King of Hell is howling in rage. Crowley's temper very often vacillates precipitously between dead-calm and histrionically angry, and right now he's switched to the latter setting.

"You'd better bloody unchain me, or that niece of yours is going to be a hellhound's chew-toy, you understand me?!"

This is the first thing they hear upon entering the building, and it sends an icy spike of uneasiness through their hearts, even though they know this is precisely what he intends. He's all talk. Mary is safe, safe in the bunker.

Seeing Dean and Claire rejoin them, Crowley's demeanor reverts back to cavalier. "Ah. Jack and Rose have finally decided to take time out of their impassioned love story to join us. You're just in time. The ship's just about to sink."

"The only ship going down around here is yours," Dean scoffs. "The Gates of Hell are closing, and the captain is chained to the helm."

"That's very witty of you, Squirrel, but you forget that the very reason the ship is sinking is because I'm _not _going down with it," Crowley says patronizingly.

"Enough," Sam spits, fed-up with the metaphor. He strides over the altar to ready the syringe for the next injection.

To their immense shock, they see a spark of fear in Crowley's beady eyes.

At this realization, Dean feels a smirk tugging at his lips. "We are turning you human," he allows, "but that don't mean you're getting outta this mess in one piece. We cure you, we kill you, you go straight back to the Pit with no way back."

"Please, send me back," he snarls. "In case you forgot, I'm _King_."

"As a _demon_," Dean corrects. "As a human soul… Well, you're gonna be in line for the rack, just like all the rest of 'em."

At this, Crowley seems genuinely fazed.

"You won't kill me," he refutes self-assuredly. "You don't have the stomach for it."

"Don't have the stomach for it?" Dean snorts cruelly, "How many o' your butt-buddies you seen us gank, huh? Did it seem like I _had the stomach for it_ when I jammed an Angel Blade into your intern's spleen?"

"That's different," Crowley sneers. "Those are _demons_. Like you've so redundantly mentioned, I'm going to be _human_."

"You don't think I got what it takes to kill a son of a bitch like you?" Dean laughs mirthlessly.

"No," he says frankly. "That's one of your _rules_, innit? No killing humans."

Dean, still smirking, replies, "Like I always say, rules are made to be broken. Whaddyou think's even motivating me to go through with this fiasco in the first place? Spoiler alert – it's the thought of driving a knife through your smug little face. Killing you as a demon would be too easy – too merciful. I want you to suffer. I want you to be human. I want you to die and go to Hell all over again."

"I climbed to the top of the ladder once," he says in a modulated tone, "I can certainly do it again."

"Well, _Godspeed_," he mocks. " 'cause I've been there, and I know what's gotta happen first. And it's gonna be hard to muster the energy when once you remember there's no way to get topside anyway."

Crowley gulps almost imperceptibly – maybe the blood is working, after all.

Sam's glassy eyes dart between his brother and their captive. "Time for your medicine," he tells Crowley, voice low. Without further warning, he shoves the needle into his wrist and presses his own blood into the demon's veins.

Crowley lets out an outraged hiss, thrashing against his chains. They jingle almost innocently with each movement. His eyes go dark, but can't seem to hold it; the shade of black flickers like a strobe light, his human eyes fighting to be seen.

He's furious, searching for something – anything – to torment them with, to make them stop.

"Look at what this is doing to you, Sam!" he shouts desperately. His voice is rough, guttural. His head snaps to Dean. "Look at what this is doing to him! He's going to die. Is that what you want? Because I was under the distinct impression that you would do _anything _to prevent that outcome."

Dean is silent, grinding his teeth. Claire tightens her grip on his waist. "He's just trying to distract you," she whispers urgently.

This does not escape Crowley's notice. "That's right," he snarls, "you've _changed_. You're a different sort of family-man now, not the type to trade his soul for a lost cause. You know what they said about you down there? They said that you _wanted_ to die, that you always did, and that little Sammy was just an excuse. Now… Well, now you find some harlot that strikes your fancy and you're itching to throw your brother on the pyre-"

"SHUT UP!" Dean roars, bounding towards Crowley. His fist makes contact with his right cheekbone, splitting the skin, and when Sam rips him away he's panting.

"Stop it, Dean!" he objects. "Can't you see this is what he wants?"

By now Crowley is cackling evilly, blood staining his teeth.

"You know what they call her, down there?" he continues to goad. "Your precious little prophet? They call her the Winchester whore! And who could blame her? A year is a _long _time, Dean-o. Tell me, how sure are you that that sack of drool is really yours? Moose here seems awfully quick to die for _your _daughter, doesn't he? Maybe _that's _why you're so willing to let him take the bullet."

Dean is hyperventilating in rage, but Sam and Claire are holding him back. "He's just trying to get under your skin, Dean," Sam maintains. "You know they're all just lies."

"You can't listen to him," Claire piles on. "Don't give him the satisfaction!"

Dean inhales sharply through his nostrils, before pushing the air out of his lungs through his mouth. Okay. He's okay. He's not gonna lose it.

A bit harshly, he shirks out of his companions' grip and paces over to the other side of the church. Only a half hour to go, and he's having second thoughts.

"Sam, get over here," he barks, and the shadow of a smile flits across Crowley's face.

Sam, a bit unsure, walks over to where Dean is standing. He's hunched slightly, his spine compacted under the tremendous pressure of his stress.

"What is it?" Sam inquires.

"Don't do this," he says plainly. "Let's just kill Crowley and get the hell out of this dump."

He starts incredulously, "Dean-," but his brother cuts him off.

"I know we had an agreement. I know we did. But this just feels wrong, Sam."

Sam sets his jaw. "You're letting Crowley get to you. We're so close – can't you see it's working? Look at him – _look at him! _He's fucking terrified, he'll try anything to get himself out of this. It's _working_."

"I know," Dean allows, "but that doesn't matter anymore. What matters is all of us together and alive. So let's just snuff this asshat and leave – that'll solve the whole demon issue. And just think, think about all we learned from this – we know how to gank a hellhound, how to move souls between worlds – let's just kill him and be done with it!"

"You know as well as I do that if it's not Crowley, it'll be someone else. We kill him, and some other demon will just crop up in his place. People will die if I don't finish this, Dean!"

"We know enough now to turn the tide for good!" Dean insists. "We can make a real difference here, but I can't do it without you!"

Sam, eyes watering, chokes, "You – you can barely do it with me! You didn't trust me to do this, you think I screw up everything I touch – and you're not wrong! I've always been the fuck-up little brother. You've been saving my ass for as long as I can remember."

"C'mon, man, that's not true," Dean rebukes gravely.

"It is! It is true! I have _sucked the life_ out of _your life_, Dean! You wanna know what I confessed in there? What my greatest sin was? It was how many times I let you down," he sobs. "I can't do that again."

This is all wrong, Dean thinks. His fury has boiled down to nothing, evaporated into a thick fog of horror. "Sam…" he tries raggedly. "How can you… How can you even say that? It has _never_ been like that. Never. I need you to see that."

"I have to do this," he manages, with newfound resolve. Tears and sweat are mingled on his face, forging rivers down his hollow cheeks. "I _need _to do this."

"And I need you not to!"

Sam laughs bitterly. "Well. I guess I'm just gonna have to be selfish, then. Like always."

Before Dean can stop him, Sam uses Ruby's knife to slice his hand open, bolts towards Crowley, and forces his blood into his mouth.

"Sam, NO!" Dean cries, chasing clumsily after him.

Claire stumbles back in shock as the two Winchesters wrestle on the blighted floor of the church, but it's already too late – Crowley has ingested the blood.

They all expected it to be more dramatic. It was too soon; maybe it's not going to work. Crowley seems unchanged, and Sam is still hanging on as well as he had been.

The brothers pause their tussling to watch Crowley, who gripes, "That's it?"

"Did it work?" Claire murmurs.

Sam looks like he's about to answer, before his features twist into a pained grimace.

"Sam? SAM?" Dean shakes him.

Sam is hissing and moaning and shit shit shit, Dean thinks, _no_. It's Cold Oak all over again. It's Stull Cemetery all over again.

Dean wrenches away from his brother as though he has some contagious disease, walking backwards without tearing his eyes away from his limp form because no no _no_, this isn't happening.

Is Crowley human? Is Sam dead? Did it work?

One way to find out.

He turns around and kicks Crowley's chair over, pummeling him viciously. He can feel his bones crack against his knuckles, feel his ribs split and puncture his lungs. Dean decimates the chair itself too, causing fragments of wood to shoot through the air like projectiles. He rams the toe of his boot into Crowley stomach with as much force as he can conjure. His belly soft and absorbs the impact. He makes a strangled, gurgling noise. Blood streams from his mouth.

He hits Crowley again and again and again, and in doing so he starts for transfer his own pain onto him.

Somewhere, off in the distance, someone is shouting, "You're killing him, Dean!"

And Dean, laughing on the inside, thinks, yeah, I am, thank God.

Because that means that's it, that means it's over.

Claire comes out of nowhere and side-tackles him, trying as vehemently as she can to drag him away from his potential victim.

"What about Sam?!" she screams in his ear, and he starts to sober up. The red haze begins to dissipate, and something else begins to happen.

He drops to his knees beside his brother, at the base of the altar, beneath the naked crucifix. Claire kneels on the other side, across from him, and Crowley lays unconscious in a puddle of blood.

"C'mon, little brother," Dean chants hysterically. "Hang on. You're gonna be just fine." The words that pour out of his mouth are meaningless. Claire is crying, searching frenziedly for a pulse, and Dean is just staring at his brother's frozen face.

His chest constricts; shards of despair perforate his heart like shrapnel. A lump builds in his throat like a tumor. He feels like he's dying. Dying of trauma, dying of sickness. Dying.

Because Sam… Sam is already dead.

His brain is spinning, overturning every memory, scouring every crevice for something that could possibly help him. _What can I do? What can I even try? _No demon-deals, no God. No nothing.

A prayer rips from his mouth before he can stop it. It's not a prayer to God or some other unknown entity, because Dean can't stand to think there are still things in this world that he hasn't seen, that he doesn't understand.

"_CASTIEL!_" tears out of him, each foreign syllable grating over his bone-dry tongue. He turns his head up towards the sky, unthinkingly, surprised by his own actions. It's stupid, he knows, Castiel's dead, he knows, but right now it's all he can summon.

Claire's tear-suffused eyes bore into his. She's never heard him say the angel's full name.

"What are you doing?" she chokes. "Castiel is dead. We have to take him to a hospital. I can still feel a pulse. It's slight, but it's there."

Dean, with some help from Claire, heaves Sam's dead-weight into the back of the Impala. He has been here before, so long ago. Right now, he can see it as clearly as the day it happened: his baby brother lying stiff on a filthy mattress in an abandoned shack.

He wants to retch but his stomach is empty, empty as the rest of him.

Sam is in the backseat, head lolling at every jagged turn as Dean races to the nearest hospital, which happens to be in Nebraska.

Claire is sobbing and sobbing and he can't hear it, he can only hear _I need to do this_ uttered repeatedly in his brother's voice.

They all have things they need to do.

They all need to do the wrong thing.

Dean might've just murdered a man, and he feels not even the faintest tinge of remorse. Maybe they deserve it. Maybe that's why they've been punished so profoundly. _Maybe they deserve it._

It takes every machine in the Good Samaritan Hospital's arsenal to keep Sam Winchester alive. The name is a sick joke, Dean thinks, and Sam might be alive but he sure as hell doesn't seem it.

"I'm sorry, sir. Your brother has suffered severe internal hemorrhaging. I do not want to give you false hope, so I must be frank – we're doing all we can, but there is little chance he'll make it out of this," says the junior cadet doctor with cropped black hair.

He scrubs his hand over his face. He didn't expect to hear any less.

He says, "Okay," like it's really just that, like it really is okay.

The doctor leaves and Claire is sitting at Sam's bedside, her face raw and sticky from crying. Her hand is dwarfed atop his brother's huge one. Dean notices that her flesh, while very pale, makes Sam's seem gray.

"What're we gonna do," he murmurs to himself. The words come out slurred, almost drunkenly. He hasn't felt this lost since Sam vanished into a hole in the ground.

He hadn't expected a response – not from Claire, not from anyone.

But then he hears:

"Maybe I can help," in the most miraculous and familiar croaking voice.

He whirls around to see an angel standing in the doorway.

**THE END**

* * *

**A/N: I hope you all liked it! I know it's not a great beautiful happy ending, but I think you guys can fill in the blanks and have faith that they _will _have their happy ending. The tone of this story is angst-central and I don't want to pull a JK Rowling right at the end, so I decided to leave it semi-open to interpretation. Some of the dialogue is (c) SPN, which I'm sure you guys recognized. I'm really nit-picky and I tend to go back and edit things, so if at any point you decided to reread this and it's a little different, don't be surprised lol.**

**A few people have already asked about a sequel - I am NOT going to write a sequel to this story. Unfortunately, my schedule right now just won't permit another full-blown story, and I think this was a good place to end my Claire 'Verse. **

**HOWEVER, I am probably going post 2 new SPN stories (haha I know, it sounds like way more work than just writing a sequel, but just hear me out). Story one would be a series of one-shots (case-shots) about Claire and Dean hunting during the year between 'Turn the Page' and 'The Sound of Silence.' Story two would be a series of one-shots about Sam and Dean in the canon. If you guys are interested in either of these, I'll post an addendum to 'Turn the Page' _(__not _this story, because posting it to TTP makes more sense sequentially), so be on the look-out! **

**Again, thank you so much for reading/following/faving/reviewing. You guys are amazing and I'm so lucky to have gotten any feedback at all - I honestly felt like I was posting this story (and the first one) into dead air, so I can't even begin to express how grateful I am that people actually read this.**

**Much love,**

**Persephone**


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